Assessment and Measuring a Love of Learning

A national panel is calling for radically different assessment tests here, so teachers can fine-turne their instruction to meet deficiencies found in their students’ learning.  From the article:

"There are boundless benefits to endorsing [the commission's] proposal of transforming assessment to render it for education so as to inform and guide daily progress in learning and development, supporting education's primary learning and teaching processes with richer pedagogies informed by the learning sciences," he [Roy Pea] said in a statement.

They are looking for “richer pedagogies”  Here’s the problem.  Children (and every one else) learn best when they fall in love with a subject area and try to learn everything they can about it.   I doubt that figuring out if children have acquired a love of learning is part of this testing protocol.

I had a student once who feel in love with physics in junior high.  He spent the next three years trying to read all different kinds of physics books. By high school he was doing independent studies in physics, and then went on to Harvard.  My eight-year-old grandson loves sports statistics, and can give me informed commentary on the various teams chances for winning.  And he’s eight!

We need some kind of discussion of how to help children love learning.  I don’t think all of this emphasis on testing and common core curriculum is helping.