What's Old is New When Talking About Measuring Outcomes

While preparing for my day on Saturday at the Montessori Administrators Association (MAA) meetings in St. Paul, I ran across the following quote about measurement from an article by A.S. Barr in The Journal of Educational Research:

"The last thirty years have seen the development and spread of two exceedingly important movements in American Education: (a) the measurement movement; and (b) the new education movement. The measurement movement has expressed itself in the development of better instruments for measuring the results of instruction: instruments known to be valid, reliable and objective. The reform movement has aimed at a broader interpretation of the objectives of education and at the development of new means, methods, and materials for the realization of these new purposes of education. The two movements have been, in many respects, in conflict with each other. One of the tenets of the new education has been that activities should be substituted for logically organized subject matter. Education has been interpreted as the progressive reconstruction of experience. Test constructors (and the users of tests), finding logically organized subject matter much easier to measure than activities, have centered their attention upon the measurement of the products of logically taught subject matter. Another tenet of the new education is that education should attend to the interests, attitudes, and ideals of school children, as well as to knowledges and skills. With the exception of a limited number of attitude tests, test constructors have been primarily concerned with the measurement of knowledges and skills. A third tenet of the new education is that education should concern itself, not merely with the intellectual, but with the physical, social, and emotional well-being of boys and girls. While there has been a considerable amount of experimental testing of the physical, social, and emotional products of education, test users have continued to use chiefly the tests of the intellectual products of education. A fourth tenet of the new education is that education must concern itself with associate and concomitant learning, as well as primary learning. Partly by choice and partly because of the newness of the testing movement, test constructors have concerned themselves chiefly with primary learnings. In all of these respects, these two movements have been, if not in theory, at least in fact, in conflict." 

The quote is longish but I am sure you get the idea even from a quick scan--measurement and progressive pedagogy (like alternative pedagogies of many types) are in conflict.  Much what we hear whenever the conversation turns to defining outcomes from any of the nontraditional approaches to teaching and learning.  Except the quote above appeared in 1930!  The same philosophical and methodological issues have been kicked around for 80+ years at least.  Really, the only thing keeping the quote from sounding fresh is some dated use of language.

"Outcomes" does not have to equal "testing."  I am hoping we can move the conversation along, at least for Montessorians, this weekend.