Should Portfolios Replace Placement Tests?
How do we know if a student is ready for high school algebra—or college-level English or math? Most K-12 schools and universities rely on placement tests, high-stakes standardized exams, to decide. And, if you don’t do well on that single test, you’re out of luck.
At the college level, one third of students—even those who earned A’s and B’s in high school—have to take remedial courses that don’t count toward their degrees because they didn’t score well on a placement test. But are all those students really that far behind or is there a misalignment between the work they can actually do and what the test questions ask?
The love affair with the single high-stakes exam is cooling. Many educators are looking to take a more holistic approach to figuring out what students really know and can do. That often means using portfolios, a purposeful collection of a student’s best work, to assess the way students demonstrate proficiency in a subject.
Inspired by visual and performing arts traditions, education portfolios have long been common in the classrooms
How Gaming Is Changing the Classroom
By the time she’s 21 years old, a student will play nearly 10,000 hours of video games. But can kids play their way to learning? An increasing number of educators are recognizing that students aren’t responding to old-school lectures, and they’re looking to engage the gamer generation by bringing gaming into the classroom.
Since 2009, an entire school, New York City’s Quest to Learn, has used gaming-based learning principles to help students achieve. Instead of sitting kids in front of a screen all day, the school uses a gaming curriculum