MEASURING THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF CHILDREN

The success or failure of the teacher in applying the principles which have been discussed in the preceding chapters is measured by the achievements of the children. Of course, it is also possible that the validity of the principle which we have sought to establish may be called in question by the same sort of measurement. We cannot be sure that our methods of work are sound, or that we are making the best use of the time during which we work with children, except as we discover the results of our instruction. Teaching is after all the adaptation of our methods to the normal development of boys and girls, and their education can be measured only in terms of the changes which we are able to bring about in knowledge, skill, appreciation, reasoning, and the like.

Any attempt to measure the achievements of children should result in a discovery of the progress which is being made from week to week, or month to month, or year to year. It would often be found quite advantageous to note the deficiencies as well as the achievements at one period as compared with the work done two or three months later. It will always be profitable to get as clearly in mind as is possible the variation among members of the same class, and for those who are interested in the supervision of schools, the variation from class to class, from school to school, or from school system to school system. For the teacher a study of the variability in achievement among the members of his own class ought to result in special attention to those who need special help, especially a kind of teaching which will remove particular difficulties. There should also be offered unusual opportunity and more than the ordinary demand be made of those who show themselves to be more capable than the ordinary pupils.

The type of measurement which we wish to discuss is something more than the ordinary examination. The difficulties with examinations, as we have commonly organized them, has been their unreliability, either from the standpoint of discovering to us the deficiencies of children, or their achievements. Of ten problems in arithmetic or of twenty words in spelling given in the ordinary examination, there are very great differences in difficulty. We do not have an adequate measure of the achievements of children when we assign to each of the problems or words a value of ten or of five per cent and proceed to determine the mark to be given on the examination paper. If we are wise in setting our examinations, we usually give one problem or one word which we expect practically everybody to be able to get right. On the other hand, if we really measure the achievements of children, we must give some problems or some words that are too hard for any one to get right. Otherwise, we do not know the limit or extent of ability possessed by the abler pupils. It is safe to say that in many examinations one question may actually be four or five times as hard as some other to which an equal value is assigned.

Another difficulty that we have to meet in the ordinary examination is the variability among teachers in marking papers. We do not commonly assign the same values to the same result. Indeed, if a set of papers is given to a group of capable teachers and marked as conscientiously as may be by each of them, it is not uncommon to find a variation among the marks assigned to the same paper which may be as great as twenty-five per cent of the highest mark given. Even more interesting is the fact that upon re-marking these same papers individual teachers will vary from their own first mark by almost as great an amount.

Still another difficulty with the ordinary examination is the tendency among teachers to derive their standards of achievement from the group itself, rather than from any objective standard by which all are measured. It is possible, for example, for children in English composition to write very poorly for their grade and still to find the teacher giving relatively high marks to those who happen to belong to the upper group in the class. As a result of the establishment of such a standard, the teacher may not be conscious of the fact that children should be spurred to greater effort, and that possibly he himself should seek to improve his methods of work.

Out of the situation described above, which includes on the one hand the necessity for measurement as a means of testing the success of our theories and of our practice, and on the other hand of having objective standards, has grown the movement for measurement by means of standard tests and scales. A standard test which has been given to some thousands of children classified by grades or by ages, if given to another group of children of the same grade or age group will enable the teacher to compare the achievement of his children with that which is found elsewhere. For example, the Courtis tests in arithmetic, which consist of series of problems of equal difficulty in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division may be used to discover how far facility in these fields has been accomplished by children of any particular group as compared with the achievements of children in other school systems throughout the country. In these tests each of the problems is of equal difficulty. The measure is made by discovering how many of these separate problems can be solved in a given number of minutes.

A scale for measuring the achievements of children in the fundamental operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division has been derived by Dr. Clifford Woody, which differs from the Courtis tests in that it affords opportunity to discover what children can achieve from the simplest problem in each of these fields to a problem which is in each case approximately twice as difficult as the problems appearing on the Courtis tests. The great value of this type of test is in discovering to teachers and to pupils, as well, their particular difficulties. A pupil must be able to do fairly acceptable work in addition before he can solve one problem on the Courtis tests. Considerable facility can be measured on the Woody tests before an ability sufficient to be registered on the Courtis tests has been acquired. In his monograph on the derivation of these tests Mr. Woody gives results which will enable the teacher to compare his class with children already tested in other school systems. In the case of all of these standard tests, school surveys and superintendents’ reports are available which will make it possible to institute comparisons among different classes and different school systems. One form of the Woody tests is as follows: