Report card fails postmodern student assessments

The deans argue that there are no absolutes, as knowledge is always tentative and shifting and, as a result, there are no right or wrong answers. Pass-fail and traditional approaches to learning are considered obsolete: "The essence of the old basics was encapsulated simply in the subject areas of the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic - it was a kind of shopping list of things-to-be-known - through drilling the times tables, memorising spelling lists, learning the parts of speech and correct grammar.

"There is no way that a curriculum based on factual content or straightforward right and wrong answers can anticipate the range of life alternatives any one student is likely to encounter across a lifetime."

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is also opposed to the more traditional forms of assessment. In the jargon much loved by educrats, the AATE's policy, entitled Assessment and Reporting English, states: "The use of decontextualised, standardised tests for monitoring the performance of students and of schools is unhelpful. In the past such tests have been more frequently employed to attack good teaching than otherwise. Students have come to see the test as part of the curriculum because teachers feel compelled to teach to them."

The flaws and contradictions inherent in formative assessment are many. First, research tells us that before children can attempt higher order thinking, they have to master the basics, including times tables, mental arithmetic and knowing the structure of a sentence.

As noted by Jean Renoir, when he asked his father the secret of his success as an impressionist painter, success was based on years of hard, often repetitive work in the academy learning the basics of drawing and perspective.

Creativity requires structure and discipline; it does not happen by accident. As such, there is nothing wrong with teachers teaching and then testing whether students have mastered what is required; teaching to the test can be beneficial.

Second, in the real world there are right and wrong answers and consequences for failure. The next time you fly, pray that the pilot knows the correct way to take off and land. While there is some truth in the proposition that learners construct their own understanding of the world, there are also objective facts related to the established disciplines of knowledge that teachers need to teach and students need to learn.

The next time you drive across a bridge, hope that the engineers knew and respected the laws of physics and that their understanding was not at the "beginning" or "emerging" stage.

While there is an element of truth in the proposition that students learn in different ways and at different rates, there is also the reality that those children who fail to master the basics in the early years of primary school are destined to failure in later years.

A related point is that not all students have the same level of ability or motivation to succeed. As a result of never being told they have failed, many students leave school with an inflated and unrealistic sense of their own ability and worth.

Third, formative assessment is very wasteful, time-consuming and overly bureaucratic. One only needs to see the hundreds of vague outcome statements that Australian primary teachers have to monitor and report against to understand their frustration and despair.

Not only does formative assessment promote a checklist mentality that weakens the integrity of particular subjects by seeking to quantify everything, learning is reduced to what can be measured, but time and energy is diverted from the joy of teaching.