Today is the day for thought-provoking reading.

Here is another piece that I urge you to read.  At NewRepublic.com, Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in defense of testing -- but not the Big Tests that leave students quaking and that drive the modern school reform movement.

(Speaking of big testing, I will post the 2013 Georgia SAT scores tonight.  They are under embargo until  12:01. I participated in a press call yesterday on the scores and will talk about the College Board's concerns.)

Emanuel says that short tests, administered in the midst of learning, can reinforce the material and improve retention and comprehension. He cites the research of Duke's Andrew Butler who has found that the retrieval of memory affects memory.

In a 2007 study, Butler and Henry L. Roediger wrote: "In most educational settings, tests are employed as a means to evaluate student learning for the purpose of assigning grades. The heavy emphasis on assessment often obscures another function of testing that is highly relevant to the goals of education: the promotion of learning."

Through their experiment, the two researchers found "compelling evidence that testing can improve the retention of classroom lecture material by way of a postlecture test procedure that can be easily implemented in the classroom." 

Among their conclusions: "In addition to boosting retention, frequent testing can help to lower students’ test anxiety and increase the regularity of studying."

Here is what Dr. Emanuel writes. This is only an excerpt. Please read the full piece before commenting:

With so much riding on test scores for both teachers and students, the standardized exams required by No Child Left Behind seem to encourage more cheating than learning. At best, they foster memorization, but at the expense of originality and critical thinking. In the modern era, when information can be more easily—and accurately—Googled than mentally recalled, old-fashioned testing strikes its critics as obsolete. (That is what a bunch of students caught cheating at New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School tried arguing.) But it turns out that the right kinds of assessments—frequent, short tests—can actually yield big educational benefits. It’s called the “testing effect,” and policymakers are missing an opportunity by not doing more to take advantage of it.

The problem with the standardized tests mandated by No Child Left Behind—as well as with the SAT, A.P., GMAT, MCAT, bar exam, medical boards, and the rest of the standardized tests undergirding the U.S. credentialing system—is that they’re built on what researchers call the “dipstick” view of assessment. They assume that there’s a fixed amount of knowledge and ability in a student’s head, which the test merely measures. But that’s not what science has shown. Done properly, testing is not inert. Rather, it can be much more like the physical phenomena underlying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the act of measuring students, you can actually affect how much knowledge they absorb and how well they retain it.

Though it doesn’t get a lot of mainstream attention, the research documenting the testing effect goes back nearly 100 years. In one experiment, three groups of high school students were given reading passages to study. The first group did nothing other than go over the material once. The second group studied it two times. The third group was given an initial test on what they’d read. Two weeks later, the students in all three groups were brought back and given an identical quiz. While the group that studied the passages a second time scored better than the group that just studied them once, the students who were initially tested performed best. The results held up when the students sat for follow-ups five months later. The testing had enhanced learning and retention more than just studying.

A key to triggering the testing effect is timing: The sooner students are tested after encountering new material, the more it sinks in, while waiting just seven days to test students can substantially reduce performances. On the other hand, the more testing a student gets on a given set of more information, the greater the benefits. With the first few tests, students show dramatic gains. With further testing, the positive effects on retention taper off. But surprisingly, there is no plateau. Even after 20 or 30 tests, students’ performances progressively improve with each additional assessment..

So why isn’t there much more testing in U.S. schools? Teachers’ schedules are one major obstacle. Developing good quiz questions—not to mention grading them—is labor intensive. For the classes I teach at the University of Pennsylvania, it takes me and my co-instructor, aided by our two teaching fellows, about an hour a week to develop just five multiple-choice questions to give our students.