During my first week as a Preschool teacher, I was shocked at the variety of projects teachers created for their classrooms. Previous educators had warned me that most of my time would be spent learning and implementing a standard curriculum. However, the standard for private school teachers was quite different. Majority of the day was spent creating and catering projects to children with varying needs that fostered creativity and critical thinking.
In one project, students sat around a table with a piece of construction paper and a package of crayons. I asked the students to start drawing on their paper with a blue crayon. Majority of the students pulled out a blue crayon and began to draw, but a few students pulled out alternative colors or did not color at all. Instead of criticizing students for their alternative choices, I asked the students why they made the decision that they did. The answers varied from “I like pink” to “I want to play”, but I carefully recorded each answer and continued to ask encouraging questions to understand the students’ choices. These projects went on to inform the later projects that I implemented in the classroom, and each response led to different methods that I used to evaluate each individual student’s progress.
I did not know it at the time, but in a sense, I was employing a methods like those used in critical making. By asking students to critically think about their decisions and using those decisions to create later class projects, preschoolers were actively forming their own curriculum and evaluation standards.
Following the No Child Left Behind Act, majority of secondary schools cater their curriculum to meeting standardized testing standards (ProCon.org). Arguments against standardized testing practices state that the method is neither effective nor conducive to critical or creative learning (ProCon.org). I think that current critiques of standardized test could be best approached by implementing critical making practices to create a new standard.
According to the S.E.E.D article, the lab, “… builds on research that indicates that games offer interactive contexts for thinking through and experimenting with complex problems in a hands-on fashion. They enable multiple learning styles and engage players at several levels simultaneously via text, graphics, audio, interactive processes, social interactions, and participatory play.” During the three week play experience, players of ARG games started by answering problems and exercises that the game designers created, but after, the players created their own puzzles and games.
This twostep process might offer some suggestions on overcoming the standard problem of the standardized testing process. If students were offered a standard, critical, and creative score across the testing subjects, educators might be encouraged to incorporate those types of learning methods in the classroom. This type of scoring using digital technologies would foster creativity while also producing an education standard by applying standard puzzle questions and critical making as part of the testing process. Furthermore, puzzle and game testing environments that include interactivity might offer an atmosphere that reduces testing anxiety that often seriously reduces students scores on standardized tests.
Interactive game play-based testing might have some downfalls. One problem that could arise from such a method of scoring stems from how group members might impact another’s critical and creative score. If such a test could be created, the test makers would have to ensure that groups were completely randomized and offer simple creation tasks that could be recreated in different ways. Furthermore, each group member would have to be forced to contribute in some way to the puzzle’s creation. Another way to overcome this obstacle would be to make test takers work with multiple groups where their creative scores could be evaluated holistically rather than based off one specific project.
Further research into critical-making practices and those practices correlation with learning must be conducted before recreating the current standardized model. However, the present standards for testing are failing to recognize the complexities and learning modes for different children, and reinventing that model becomes more and more pertinent with each generation.
Digital media has allowed for a new ways to approach learning using both critical and creative practices. Why not allow those approaches inform testing practices that may encourage teachers to implement those approaches in the classroom? Every student does not want to color with a blue crayon, and critical-making based testing approaches could offer an opportunity to better understand the way students differ and how to evaluate those choices.
“Standardized Tests - ProCon.org.” ProConorg Headlines, standardizedtests.procon.org/.