by Stephen Hammel

Created on: June 22, 2009

Since the inception of accountability measures for our education system, teachers, students, and parents have argued over the validity of testing, the formats, the questions, and the need for these high-stakes tests. Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards has risen to the upper reaches of tests in America as a test with at least some credibility in assessing what it sets out to assess. Currently, math, reading, and writing are tested, with science and social studies in developmental stages. One of the unique characteristics of AIMS, and the thing that teachers hate about it, is its ability to test at multiple levels Bloom's Taxonomy, rather than the usual educational method of lower-level testing. When reviewing the disaggregated results of the exam, it becomes clear that teachers succeed in teaching what, but fail miserably in teaching why and how.

Bloom's Taxonomy delineates levels of thought. At the lower levels, knowledge, understanding, and application, teachers are able to provide generic lessons with wide-ranging applications for students to digest and regurgitate on multiple-choice exams, or through simple short answers. The more advanced levels of thought, including analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, are not something teachers are able to hand to students because they require the student to employ thinking skills that are difficult to attain in the classroom, and there are often no black and white answers, but rather gray areas the students must navigate on their own. To put it simply, AIMS requires students to think. The reason test scores on this exam have been so low is because teachers cannot think for the students, and students are not accustomed to thinking on their own.

AIMS begins with the question of what students should be able to do by the end of their sophomore year of high school. The next question is how to ensure teachers incorporate those skills into the classroom. The third part, resulting in the actual exam, is what it will look like when a student has mastered the desired skills. For example: in reading, the standard is that students must be able to identify an author's use of "theme" in a short passage of written text. In a lower-level instructional mode, theme is defined by the teacher as "the lesson an author wants the reader to learn through the reading of the story." Note that the standard does not require the student to define theme, but rather, to identify it through a passage. The only way for this to

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