Teaching to the Test

The other day I typed “science test” into flickr in search of an image for a blog post. I was looking for an image of a pencil filling in testing bubbles but was jolted by an unexpected result. My page was filled with old photographs of men and women building things, blowing things up, and sending airplanes off of cliffs and bluffs. As I scrolled through page after page of these wonderful photographs, I realized that I had stumbled upon a perfect metaphor for so much of what is wrong in science education today – kids in schools are taking the wrong kind of science test.

Much has been written about the assumption that kids have an innate love of science activities – exploration, play, tinkering, and questioning – and attributes – curiosity, boundary pushing, and opportunity to care – and many places, classrooms, and virtual environments provide learning environments to match those activities and attributes. But as an education system and I would argue more broadly as adults, we have chosen effeciency over substance and created an education system based upon jumping through hoops instead of creating individual talent.

But what would happen if we built our system around the right kind of science tests? What metrics would we use? How would teachers do their job differently? How would classrooms look? Would there even be classrooms? Would we get more scientists? What would “teaching to the test” look like?

The questions are endlessly fascinating but let’s not forget that there are at- scale models that can help us understand how this may work. From Career and Technical Education to the Girl Scouts badge system, millions of kids participate in this alternate realty and it’s only a testiament to the inherent goodness of children that they can switch back and forth between the two worlds.

Meghan Groome

Meghan Groome is the Executive Director of Education and Public Programs at the New York Academy of Sciences, an organization with the mission to advance scientific research and knowledge, support scientific literacy, and promote the resolution of society’s global challenges through science-based solutions. After graduating from Colorado College in Biology and Theatre, she desperately needed a job and took one as a substitute teacher at a middle school in Ridgewood NJ. She discovered that had a knack for making science interesting and enjoyable, mostly through bringing in gross things, lighting things on fire (but always in a safe manner), and having a large library of the worlds best science writing and science fiction. After teaching in both Ridgewood and Paterson, NJ she completed her PhD at Teachers College Columbia University with a focus on student question asking in the classroom. While at TC, she was a founding member of an international education consulting firm, and worked on projects from Kenya to Jordan with a focus on designing new schools and school systems in the developing world. After graduating, Dr. Groome became a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Governors Association on Governor Janet Napolitano’s Innovation America Initiative. Prior to her work at the Academy, Dr. Groome worked at the American Museum of Natural History and authored the policy roadmap for the Empire State STEM Education Network and taught urban biodiversity in the Education Department. At the Academy, she is responsible for the Afterschool STEM Mentoring program, which places graduate students and postdocs in the City’s afterschool programs and the Science Teacher program where she designs field trips and content talks to the City’s STEM teachers.