Why We Measure Student Engagement

When I was the head of school at The Wellington School in Ohio, I often found myself in disagreement with the state government about what really proved student success in the classroom. The state of Ohio prescribed a typical approach, instituting a regime of standardized end of course exams which measured what the state government thought was important — or at least, what the state government thought was easily testable. This is not to say that all standardized testing is worthless, but it is to say that I believed that Ohio asked far too little of its students.

So, what is right and wrong with standardized testing? Standardized testing does allow us to measure how well our children can answer a set of questions placed before them. Furthermore, we can use these standardized measurements to compare performances of students between schools, districts, and states, making them useful for research.

However, at the same time, the brutal emphasis on high-stakes testing as the arbiter of success in education creates numerous problems. If the success of students, teachers, and schools are the direct result of these tests, as they are in many places, the incentives placed before educators changes. Rather than being rewarded for educating students, they are rewarded for how well they can get students to pass these tests. Whether these incentives reward teachers who can better predict the questions students will face, or whether they drive teachers to find ways of gaming the tests, the focus of schools changes from teaching to test-taking.

This kills curiosity and prevents real learning. I am reminded of a statement from Mr. Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dicken’s Hard Times, whose words ring true more now than ever: “We’ve done him one step better, teaching children not just the facts, but a narrowly chosen set of facts tailored to questions that can be answered narrowly and repetitively.”

Daniel Koretz, in his book “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better,” goes into exhaustive and thought-provoking detail on this very subject. I cannot recommend his book more highly.

My belief, and the belief of The Wellington School, was that the role of school was to prepare students to do big things. We believed that helping students to discover, imagine, and create, based on thorough and deep learning was far more important than test preparation. While we were able to make this argument to the state, the state education power structure kept asking: what is it you will measure?

We wanted students at all levels and all grades to be required to find questions that were personally fascinating to them, to find ways to answer those questions, to answer them and to then defend their answers in debate. Our educational woes have never been solved by reducing opportunities for students to be inspired and opportunities for teachers to inspire. Focusing on “a narrowly chosen set of facts” could not help us inspire, but allowing teachers to help students to think deeply and outside of the box could.

Inspiring students and driving them forward required that students felt two things simultaneously. Firstly, we needed to ensure that students were deeply challenged in their work, being pushed to the limits of their knowledge and abilities. We also needed to help ensure that they loved their work, so that they would be self-motivated, and always hungry for more. We identified this intersection of deep challenge and love for the challenge as the place where students were most engaged, and endeavored to measure how often our students fell in this place.

This seemed so basic and so obvious. As a result, Wellington developed the Wellington Engagement Index, a simple tool that allows students to quickly share how challenging they find their work, and how much they love their work, to their schools. This data helped Wellington to improve the quality of teaching and learning in already existing classes, but also to create innovative, engaging, and unique new programs to inspire and challenge students. Focusing on student engagement allows our educators to teach more creatively and effectively, and helps us better prepare our students for tomorrow.