What future are we aiming at? This series of 6 posts, Future Vision 2025, describes some of my personal education mission milestones. These are not predictions, they are aspirational. They are framed as significant differences one could see or make by 2025. What’s noticeably different in 2025 when one examines students, parents, teachers, learning, assessment, media & society? How and when these milestones are reached are not addressed. Some milestones are indicated by the emergence of something ‘new’ (at least at robust scale), others by the fading away of something familiar and comfortable.
Assessment 2025
In the 1970’s, I remember taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in math & English, in a few grades, for a few hours.
By 2015 a Council of Great City Schools evaluation showed students undergo standardized testing for 20-25 hours per year, not to mention testing prep time. By the time they graduate, students have been administered about 112 exams. Now, this is great fodder for the program evaluation work I do now, understanding what is working, how much and for whom. It would be impossible at scale without plenty of universal standardized test data. But in the future, given digital content, the 20-25 hours per year of standardized testing can be eliminated while retaining the benefits of the information they used to provide. This reduction of non-learning-added time is in more than just the test hours, it includes eliminating the prep hours for the style of test. And most importantly, this implodes the paradigm that test scores are the purpose, and test day is the culmination, of the school year’s efforts.
By 2025, “sitting tests” in March and April has been replaced by a continual assessment of knowledge and ability throughout the school year, via organic student interaction with the digital learning activities themselves. These activities each week still include practicing solving many problems, aka “doing problem sets.” The information generated from the digital “Practice” IS the new “Assessment.” Indeed summative standardized tests were essentially a review problem set, given in a huge dose at the end of the year. In 2025, each week every student’s use of digital content indicates mastery of that week’s content…or not. Gaps are identified as they occur, and are filled before moving on. You may ask, thinking back to cramming for a final, what about the retention that summative tests checked? In 2025, the digital content and practice adaptively checks retention of key prior knowledge for each individual student, intelligently spiraling problems back and forth to build fluency.
Moreover, beyond the conventional goal of “producing the right answer,” 2025’s digital device interface and pattern recognition assesses student strategy. Tablets collect, and the backend cloud parses and interprets, student handwriting and diagrams. “Show your work” is digitized and thus comprehensively purposeful. The information gleaned evaluates methods and strategies, and yes even productivity and speed. Insightful and actionable feedback on all of these is provided in real-time to the teacher and especially to the student. Why a student “isn’t getting it” becomes detailed and transparent. In 2025 haven’t just replaced “right answer” to “right strategy” though; it’s a different paradigm. Mastery is not tied to one “right” strategy, but it is about learning and applying strategies and methods that are productive – efficiency in thought, effort, and time.
In 2025 comprehensive content breadth and mastery of all techniques, what used to be the summative test’s job, has been measured in this digital, formative way throughout the school year. Indeed because of the continual feedback and intelligent spiraling, it has been not just measured, but refined and improved throughout the year towards fluency. There is still however a “final.” The benefits of a deadline to display one’s complete picture of a complex and broad topic are maintained. But because all that ongoing broad content mastery is already well known, the “final” can focus on a specific “narrow” area of interest. The final can be a performance – authentic, creative and rigorous and very human – which shows off the learner’s ability to communicate, and to creatively transfer to different domains.
Yes, I mean that a middle schooler’s integrated math “final” in 2025 can be a performance, hard to make, challenging to deliver, but fun and maybe even beautiful to watch.
Coulson on EdTech Evaluation 
Or in other words, “Mommy, what’s a book?”
Ha – I guess you mean “what’s a textbook”. You see, the thought of a non-markup-able district-owned paper textbook in a backpack going away doesn’t bother me; I think it needs to happen. But, the book as a certain length of integrated thoughts – from biographies to kid novels, going away – that I think is nuts.
Every time that the complete extinction of a paper good is predicted, i am highly skeptical. The paperless office? We use more paper with printers than back in the day with typewriters by far. Kindle-books – yeah, OK for some purposes like powering through a novel, but not at all good (yet) for other purposes. I might buy an e-book and, if I’m going to really dive into it, then buy the print copy.
Perhaps getting clarity on the need for book-length treatments of topics would be an interesting inquiry. There are reasons *not* to think that the most effective and efficient learning can come in a handful of 500 word articles or 5′ videos.