Last night, on Twitter, a teacher account posted the question, "Should students be allowed to use their notes on tests?" At the time of this writing, there are 570 replies, and it has been retweeted 148 times, presumably each with their own share of replies. As with all things on Twitter, the replies were extreme. From one commenter who said tests were nothing more than "an anxiety-producing tool of compliance" (which I might point out isn't an answer to the question) to people who said a student should absolutely never be able to use notes "or it wasn't a test" to those who thought anything other than open notes were cruel. It made me wonder how much stress these people live under. I find it hard enough to manage my own classroom decisions without having to decide what every teacher in America should do in theirs.
Notably, of the over 500 responses, only two acknowledged any nuance. Few could recognize that there might be times when an open note test is appropriate and times where it is not. Of course, that is the truth. It depends entirely on your goals for the test. An earth science teacher testing whether a student can interpret a weather map might rightly allow them to use notes, while an algebra teacher testing order of operations is right not to.
Conversations like this play out on EduTwitter every day with the same extremes of views. Direct instruction is lambasted by some (How dare you think you are a source of knowledge?) and revered by others as though it is the only way to teach. Again, it depends on the content (It's dangerous to have kids figure out chemistry on their own and I was an unfortunate recipient of the constructivist calculus experiment of the late 90s, but there are some topics that it makes sense to have kids discover on their own) and the goals.
I know I constantly sing the praises of Learning and the Brain, but one of the things I most appreciate about them is their understanding of context. When the @learningandtheb account posts research, they start with a question, and the answer rarely includes the words always or never. The answer includes words like if and often and sometimes. It describes the conditions of the research and boundaries of the experiment. Several of their speakers embrace the complexity of education, notably Dr. David Daniel who used a plant analogy - Research is like raising plants in a greenhouse where you have control over the conditions. Classroom teaching is like raising plants in your yard, where the variable are many and unpredictable. John Almarode uses this line: "Don't adopt. Adapt to your context." Andrew Watson says, "Don't do this thing. Think this way."
The needs of different classrooms are different. The age of your kids matters (older students can handle more direct instruction than younger ones). Their background matters (if they come from a place where collaboration is not valued, it may take a while to teach them to do it well). The subject you teach matters (you will obviously need to use more visuals in geometry and art than in other disciplines). The personality of the teacher matters (some of us are comfortable with controlled chaos while others are not). Your goals matter. The climate of your school and your community matters. That's a lot of variables to include in any decision, so let's stop going on Twitter and acting like what works for one works for all.
I love the West Wing, and there are often lines from it that play in my head. While they were written about politics, I find that many lines apply well to other situations. I will leave you with one of them. "Every once in a while, there is a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren't very many un-nuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."
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