The short answer is, I think open book/note tests are more authentic. By that, I mean that they more closely mimic the circumstances students will be expected to perform under in the real world. (As an aside, this is also my rational behind my no late work policy and exceptions, as well as a few other classroom procedures/policies.) I will admit that my work experience outside of education is more limited than most, but I have held several different jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with education. I have also held a variety of education-related positions, for a plethora of different schools/organizations, and at various levels. So while my work experience may be more limited than others', it is far from non-existent. One thing that I have always experienced, and observed in the work experience of family and friends who aren't educators, is that it is extremely rare that one is required to complete a task with nothing but the knowledge that exists in one's head. Rather, what commonly occurs is that one is given a task to complete and an amount of time within which to competently complete it. Occasionally further parameters will be set, such as allowable or required materials or a budget, but rarely is one told that one may not use whatever resources are available. In short, your boss expects that you will use available resources to produce quality (or at least competent) results in a (hopefully) reasonable time frame.
I believe a test can mimic this real-world situation:
Another factor that allows me to confidently assess students using this open book model is the type of assessments I give. It is rare that I pass out multiple choice, matching, or even fill-in-the-blank assessments. I prefer assessments that are, at minimum, short answer or essays. This means students have to express their knowledge in their own words, they can't simply Google the question and write a one or two word response (or circle a single letter). Let's take the listening course that I taught last semester as an example. I am required to assess students' listening comprehension skills, grammar skills, and vocabulary skills. In order to do this I could use the standard test produced by the curriculum company that has vocabulary and definition matching questions, short listening passages with basic comprehension questions, and fill-in-the blank questions for grammar. Instead, I use TED Talks. I find a TED Talk that is related to the themes we've been studying, or is something that will be interesting to my students. I then design a series of comprehension questions that require different levels of responses. Students are required to listen to the TED Talk and write complete sentence answers for each question. With one TED Talk, and 7-10 questions, I'm able to assess all the required skills:
My summative assessments were timed (my school uses Blackboard, which allows for timed tests), but they also had four formative assessments of this type, all of which were untimed. In my opinion this too is more authentic. It is rare that you have to give a big presentation to a client, release a new piece of software, or begin selling a new product without having some sort of practice with it first. The practice may be on a much smaller scale, or with a slightly different product, but you get the opportunity to do a trial run of some kind before the final release. This is why I prefer to not give summative assessments that do not mimic or contain pieces of formative assessments from the previous unit(s). As I said in the beginning, I don't claim to have all the answers. I'm not even claiming to have the best answer to this particular question! This is just the approach to assessment that I've developed/used over the last decade or so, and it seems to work well for me. Every time I've had the opportunity to explain it to an administrator or parent, he/she has affirmed the logic and ultimately supported my approach. Students have all been receptive as well (how much explanation I offer or give in response to questions depends on the age of the student, but I've used this method with students from third grade through college); and while I'm sure at the beginning they were just happy to get "easier" tests, I know by the end they really appreciated how much learning they had to demonstrate. It's not a method that I would force onto anyone else, but it does work for me, and I encourage you to consider if, or how, it could fit with your own personal teaching style. Happy teaching, everyone!
2 Comments
I completely agree with everything you say in this article
1/2/2021 04:12:23 pm
This idea is at the core of the new idea of formative assessment👏👍
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