I am constantly in awe of your buoyantly, irrepressively positive outlook, Fickle Pickle, but I suspect that it occasionally needs a reality check too.

>>Ideally learning success should be measured against the innate ability of the person being measured. Did they do as well as they could have rather than it being a comparative measure. This is hard to do but not impossible.<<

It appears already to be an insuperably tough assignment, merely to measure educational outcomes in a manner that is acceptable to all.

How much more difficult, though, to measure "innate ability"?

Where does one start?

With heredity, perhaps. One of those personal genetic analyses. Pretty tough if your father was Einstein, I guess.

Or phrenology?

More importantly, what would you be able to do with the data, even if you were able to determine it in a clear and consistent manner in the first place?

My school reports, year after year, were chock-full of "could do better if he tried" comments. Would this feedback be any more useful, simply because it has some apparently objective measurements associated with it?

Or are you perhaps looking at it from the perspective of the teacher only?

"His innate ability is sufficient to allow him to breathe, so long as he concentrates really hard. This term we met our target of 95% against this measurement, only requiring medical attention on one occasion, when he was momentarily distracted by some bright colours."

I would agree with Pericles and even go further.

To test innate ablity, apart from being incredibly difficult could even be more harmful, as the teacher would then be telling the children what they were capable of, not just how they performed in a test.

The main reason for testing is to see whether the child knows and understands the curriculum. The curriculum having been determined to be the requirements to function well in the outside world.

The merits of the curriculum aside, if the child is not achieving the outcomes required, some action is required either in remedial teaching, parental supervision etc.

The alternative is what happens in the USA where children graduate without being able to read.

Pericles here is one way.

A person shows their ability early in life. One way to check innate ability and how well a child is developing (or an adult for that matter) is to keep a record of performance for each child. If we keep records for a few million children we can expect to get some pretty good indicators as to how a child develops given a whole range of innate and environmental factors.

That is, we compare the child against themselves.

That is, if we turn testing into helping people develop their abilities rather than testing to compare with others we will get much better results.

So what was this "pro-rape" web site? What did it actually say?

Nobody is going to tell us, because the whole thing is being orchestrated...

Shadowminister you say

"To test innate ablity, apart from being incredibly difficult could even be more harmful, as the teacher would then be telling the children what they were capable of, not just how they performed in a test."

The teacher would tell the child their range of expectations. Why this is harmful is hard to imagine. Surely it is sensible for my golf teacher to inform me that I am unlikely to win the club stroke championship next week and that if I manage to retain my handicap at my age I am performing well and better than expected.

As I have mentioned above testing of the same person over time moderated by comparing against other people in the past development is more informative and useful for development compared to a system whose main purpose appears to be to sort a cohort of people into categories.

FP,

Considering that achievement is largely dependent on effort, and that early testing at best gives a band of ability, the range of potential achievement would range from zero to mid level for the bottom of the class and from mid to excellent for the top of the class.

The teacher would be in effect grading the kids, and if you believe for an instant that this information does not make it back to the rest of the class, so that the kid is pegged for ability, then you are kidding yourself.

Secondly, how are you going to measure progress without some form of testing?

The kid that wants to perform better in tests knows that he can do so by working harder. If he thinks the teacher perceives him as thick, there is no motivation to even try.

The only motivation I can see for some one to try and stop testing is because their child performs badly, and rather than thinking that their likkle darling might either not be a genius, or needs to pull his finger out, the testing must be bad.

Give me a break!