Testing Literacy Today Requires More Than A Pencil And Paper
National
Post: 4.10.2019 by Authors: Louis Volante, Professor, Faculty of Education,
Brock University; Carol Campbell, Associate Professor of Leadership and
Educational Change, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of
Toronto; Christopher DeLuca, Associate Professor in Classroom Assessment and
Acting Associate Dean, Graduate Studies & Research, Faculty of Education,
Queen’s University, Ontario; Jennifer Rowsell, Canada Research Chair in
Multiliteracies, Brock University, and Lorenzo Cherubini, Professor, Brock
University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.
Large-scale
testing, or what many know as standardized testing, often carries important
consequences for students. The results of large-scale tests may be used by
schools or policy-makers to make important decisions such as grouping students
by ability or assessing how well schools are doing.
Yet
when it comes to literacy testing, while the competencies of literacy have
changed in our digital, globalized world, the methods that many educational
systems use to assess literacy have not.
One
recent analysis of standardized tests in the United States, for example, found
tests haven’t changed much over the last 100 years: tests are mostly multiple
choice, with questions geared toward assessing skills like vocabulary, recall
and comprehension.
In
Canada today, on such large-scale standardized tests, students are likely to
read a passage and answer a series of multiple-choice questions. Students might
have an opportunity to write a short answer or essay response. Provincial tests,
for the most part, continue to prioritize measuring traditional literacy skills
of reading and writing with answers primarily communicated via pencil-to-paper.
Such a testing structure forms the basis for public accountability in many
provinces.
What
literacy means today
Formerly,
literacy was broadly understood to encompass four domains: reading, writing,
speaking and listening. But today, how we define literacy has changed.
Firstly,
literacy is now understood to involve skills and knowledge related to all modes
of visual representation and digital communications. Today’s students tend to
read shorter texts within a variety of platforms on social media, websites and
apps. Schools now teach literacy through visual, moving image and even sound-based
texts that children and teenagers encounter when reading and writing online.
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| multiliteracies |
Secondly,
literacy today is also understood to be about how students can use knowledge
and skills related to personal and citizen engagement and agency. According to
the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
literacy involves the “capacity for social awareness and critical reflection as
a basis for personal and social change.”
These
forms of literacy teaching and learning — both multimedia literacy related to
varied forms of representation and expression and applied literacy — are called
multiliteracies. READ
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