A Little Snippet of My Paper

The controversy over the way schools are using assessments as a basis for their teaching methods began when our society started to shift from an industrial age. Before these changes in our society, people could get by with basic skills such as reading and arithmetic. Now our future has moved into a new direction, the informative age, also known as the digital age. Because of this major change in our society, people can no longer succeed in the world with basic knowledge skills. Schools need to rethink assessment and begin a new educational reform to adapt to the turnaround in our ever changing culture.

The industrial age has dominated our civilization for almost 300 years since it broke in the 1780s (2). During this period, vast changes in agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing had major effects of our way of life. These developments morphed our society from a pre-industrial culture into a automated civilization. Because of these innovations, peopled needed only basic knowledge to succeed in life.

Our society has now moved into a new direction, the information age. “In this new era, the global economy has shifted it's focus away from the production of physical goods and toward the manipulation of information. New technological advances in this field have changed lifestyles around the world and spawned new industries (1).” Now that our cultural values and way of life has begun to change, the way in which we choose to teach the youth of our country

needs to adjust as well in order for them to prosper.

School assessments today still focus on testing students on basic knowledge. These skills are still important when it comes to the goals of education, but schools today tend to overemphasize them in order to to raise standardized tests scores (3). Many educators believe that what gets assessed is what gets taught. This means that the majority of teachers are focusing their practices solely on the content of the assessment tests and the subject matter that educators are focusing on is taught only in the same format as it is presented on the test, instead of how it's presented in everyday life (4). This way of education may have worked well during the industrial age, but times have changed and new skills must be taught. With this new age that we are living in, our youth needs to learn how to access, investigate, define, resolve, and use information for making decisions (4)