In a major keynote address before the
Association for Test Publishers annual conference, Nine Shift co-author Wm.
Draves outlined the future of testing in the 21st century.
Testing will become even more important in this century than in the last one, he noted.
But the current system of testing is obsolete, meant to prepare students for the factory rather than knowledge work.
A few big tests given infrequently will be replaced by testing that:
- Replaces the subjective and inaccurate judgments of individual teachers;
- Measures learning and knowledge at the unit and subunit levels for each course;
- Are taken frequently, usually about once a week;
- Measures knowledge in thousands of subjects with thousands of different tests;
- Provides choice in tests based on student gender, age, ethnicity, learning style, neurological abilities, and other learning differences.
As a result, there will be thousands of different tests, almost all of them administered online, that respond to individual student testing styles.
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