Staff editorial: Computing possibilities

WE SAY forget nervous chewing — you can eat your number two pencil.

“Make your keystrokes accurate and swift. If you make a mistake and wish to change your answer, hit the ‘backspace’ button until the letter(s) and/or word(s) are removed completely from your screen. You may begin.”

If personal computers are old school, certain elements of our nation’s public school system might as well date from antiquity. In the early days of the Bush Administration, standardized testing was touted as a new tool to gauge student progress.

Now, officials tasked with overseeing public education are questioning whether the fill-in-the-bubble tests themselves don’t merit an overhaul. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced this past Thursday that many states and the District of Columbia will receive hundreds of millions of federal funds to design new standardized assessments.

Duncan said the tests will measure students’ “ability to read complex text, complete research projects, excel at classroom speaking and listening assignments and work with digital media.”

Technological advancement is the direction of the future, and we have little reason to project that testing will be an outlier to the trend.

As students grow increasingly comfortable with technology, typing answers into a text field has become the customary way to formulate responses.
Computer-based testing will give us a better way to track students’ abilities to compose their thoughts.

Some potential concerns about the quality or implications of a transition to computer-based testing have legitimacy.
Rural schools, to be sure, may find paying for the technology difficult without federal assistance.

Thus, new testing must necessarily be accompanied by adequate funding to provide all students with hardware that allows them to be equally competitive.

As standards evolve with new testing media, we risk making technology another vocational skill that takes time away from valuable basics, such as reading, writing and mathematics.

Modern times, however, force us to acknowledge that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Our society increasingly consumes its news online, and with the advent of sites such as JSTOR, the digital realm is an increasingly important forum for cutting-edge ideas and nuanced, academic thinking.

It’s slippery ground to argue that computer-based testing will improve students’ computer skills. Anyone can observe that few new skills are learned on test day.

Simply testing for computer skills won’t in itself increase students’ digital competency.

But implementing computer testing will force teachers and administrators to awaken to the reality of a digitized world. A new generation of teachers will rely on appropriately innovative technology to convey timelessly valuable material to students.

As new developments are guided by the equal worth of old ideas and new ways of accessing them, we hope to find new generations of children competitively computing on
test day.