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It's not a stretch to say that assessment is a hot button issue in education; however, you'd be hard pressed to find an educator who doesn't see the value in measuring student progress. Assessments themselves have been vilified, when, in fact, it's why assessments are given and how the data is used that is really the issue. The Glossary of Education Reform gives this great overview of what high-stakes testing is and how it impacts students, teachers, and schools. Basically, high-stakes testing has consequences for the test-takers and givers-sometimes in the form of a high school diploma, grade advancement, and even teachers' salaries. But not all assessment is high-stakes, and when done thoughtfully, the right assessment can provide extremely useful information for all stakeholders-students, teachers, parents, schools, and policy-makers

Let's take a look at what assessment is, why it's important, and how it can be delivered in the classroom in a useful manner. Then we'll dive into some resources available for each type of assessment-diagnostic, formative, and summative.

What is assessment?

Assessment is the measurement of what students are learning. Student achievement is defined as how well they've mastered certain target skills. Assessments provide educators with both objective and subjective data in order to ascertain student progress and skill mastery.

Why do we do it?

The information gleaned from assessments is extremely valuable. Besides a score, which gives quantitative data about how much of the material tested a students has mastered, information about student misconceptions can be determined by analyzing which distractors they chose and why. Information from assessments helps teachers determine which instructional approaches are best for certain students, what their students may already know about a given topic, and what subjects needs to be retaught. Districts distribute money based on needs, as determined by assessment. Policy makers use assessment results to determine the efficacy of programs.

Assessment Basics

Assessments can take many forms and can be designed for many reasons. There's a lot of jargon used to name concepts related to assessments and some of it can be hard to keep track of. Here's a quick breakdown:

Types of Assessment

Diagnostic: Given at the beginning of the school year, or the beginning of a new unit of study, a diagnostic test attempts to quantify what students already know about a topic.

Formative: Given throughout the learning process, formative assessments seek to determine how students are progressing through a certain learning goal.

Summative: Given at the end of the year or unit, summative assessments assess a student's mastery of a topic after instruction.

Norm-referenced tests: These tests measure students against a national "norm" or average in order to rank students against each other. The SAT, ACT, Iowa Basic Skills Test, and other major state standardized tests are norm-referenced.

Criterion-referenced tests: These tests measure student performance against a standard or specific goal. Unit and chapter tests as usually criterion-referenced, as are the newly developed SBAC and PARCC Common Core tests.

Question Types

Multiple choice: These questions provide students with a stem and a set of discrete possible answers from which students must choose the correct one. The possible answers generally include one correct answer and three to four distractors, designed to mimic the common misconceptions students have about the concept being tested.

Constructed response: These questions require a written response. Usually they include a one-part question, and students respond by writing a paragraph or short essay, or building and solving an equation.

Extended constructed response: These questions, like the constructed response, require a written answer. The reason they are "extended" is that they are multi-part questions, requiring students to answer the first part of the question before answering subsequent parts, which may require reflection on or further explanation of an answer given in a previous section.

Technology enhanced: These items are given in computer delivered assessments. Technology enhanced items require students to interact with the material in various ways-through actions like dragging and dropping information, highlighting relevant text, and completing sentences or equations from items in a drop-down menu.

Performance task: These items require students to use multiple stimuli to solve a problem or create something new. Performance tasks are usually scored with a rubric, which includes the criteria students must keep in mind while developing their solution. Performance tasks in ELA may include reading multiple essays and synthesizing the ideas into their own writing. In math, these tasks may ask students to analyze charts and graphs and write out a plan for using the data in a real world application.

Informal: This category covers a wide range of tasks, from checklists to observations. Informal assessment doesn't lead to a score, but it does help teachers gather important insights about students.

Delivery Methods

Pencil and paper: There's no need for a lengthy description with this delivery method. Examples include tests, quizzes, mind maps, and essays.

Online: Modern assessments are moving online, as can be seen with those developed for the Common Core State Standards, which are given strictly in that format. Online tests mean each student needs access to a device on which to take the assessment. Students also need strong digital literacy skills in order to successfully navigate the demands of online testing.

Adaptive: These online tests adapt as the user progresses through the questions. As a student gets answers correct, the program adjusts and gives the student increasingly more difficult questions. The converse is true, and the test will adapt to asking simpler questions to a student who is struggling with grade level topics. Adaptive testing gives educators a much broader picture of students' ability levels. Rather than just labeling students on, above, or below grade level, a student's actual level of knowledge can be assessed. (If this method interests you, check out our recent article on Adaptive Learning as well.

Scoring

Assessments can be scored by hand, by computer, or by combination of both. Many online assessment programs and apps can score quantitative items, like multiple choice, drag and drops, and fill-in-the-blanks, and other item types that have specific correct answers. Items like performance assessments and essays are still left for teachers or human-scorers to assess.

Reliability and validity of testing are two things that are considered when assessments are adopted. Reliability refers to the likeliness of the scores and outcomes to be repeated in several different populations of test takers. Validity refers to how the assessment outcomes are interpreted and applied. The goal of standardized testing is to be fair and impartial; however, whether or not this goal is actually realized in today's assessments is controversial, as it's nearly impossible for one test to be fair to all student populations.

Assessment Resources

There are tons of great assessment resources and ideas online. Let's take a look at how each type of assessment can be assisted with technology. We'll also explore some more unique ways to monitor your students' understanding and progress.

Diagnostic Assessment

Diagnostic assessments assess strengths, weakness, and prior knowledge. Understanding how much a student already knows about a topic is vital for effective differentiation in the classroom. Some students may already be experts in a given topic, while others may be missing foundational skills that are key to mastery. Many teachers use the same diagnostic assessment as a formative or summative assessment later into the unit to compare a student's score at the beginning, middle, and end of instruction. Diagnostic assessment lets teachers pinpoint a student's preconceptions of a topic, helping teacher's anchor further instruction on what students have already mastered. Additionally, this kind of assessment helps teachers provide instruction to skills that need more work. The APA has a great article on the importance of diagnostic assessment.

Diagnostic Apps and Software

This program provides adaptive diagnostic testing and will report on student mastery down to the sub-skill level. The program is adapted by state and district standards, as well as by which Common Core test your state has adopted (if it has adopted one). One of the more reasonably priced products out there, the cost is $6 per student, and there are tests for both math and reading diagnostics. For an additional fee ($30 per student for the school year), schools can pay for prescribed personalized lessons based on the student's diagnostic results.

Education Galaxy: Education Galaxy also offers diagnostic testing. There is a free version for teachers that doesn't include all of the bells and whistles as the paid version, but still provides diagnostics by standard and skill and prescribes a learning path for instruction based on test results.

Other Diagnostic Assessment Ideas

Observation: Watching how students solve a problem can lead to further information about misunderstanding.

Discussion: Hearing how students reply to their peers can help a teacher better understand a student's level of understanding.

Confidence Indication: On a traditional pen and paper test, include a way for students to indicate how confident they are in their answers. Letting students self-report can tell teachers a lot about a student's prior knowledge of the material.

Categorizing: Let students sort ideas into self-selected categories. Ask them to explain why such concepts go together. This will give you some insight into how students view topics.

Interviews: Design questions that get to the heart of what you're planning to teach. Interview students to gauge each child's understand of the topic. You'll come away with a great continuum of where each student's prior knowledge is. This may help you pair students to work together later in the unit.

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment monitors student performance and progress during learning. This type of learning is often low-stakes and ungraded. It's used as a way for the teacher to see if the student is making progress toward the end goal of mastering the skill. Teachers use formative assessment techniques to monitor student learning so that they can provide feedback or help along the way. Both diagnostic and summative assessments can be used as formative assessment.

Formative Apps and Software

The NWEA blog has a great list of digital formative assessment tools.

Other Formative Assessment Ideas

Exit slips: Ask students to solve one problem or answer one question on a small piece of paper. Students hand on the slips as "exit tickets" to pass to their next class, go to lunch, or transition to another activity. The slips give teachers a way to quickly check progress toward skills mastery.

Graphic organizers: When students complete mind maps or graphic organizers that show relationships between concepts, they're engaging in higher level thinking. These organizers will allow teachers to monitor student thinking about topics and lessons in progress.

Self-assessments: One way to check for student understanding is to simply ask students to rate their learning. They can use a numerical scale, a thumbs up or down, or even smiley faces to show how confident they feel about their understanding of a topic.

Think-pair-share: This is an oldie but goodie. Ask a question, give students time to think about it, pair students with a partner, have students share their ideas. By listening into the conversations, teachers can gauge student understanding and assess any misconceptions. Students learn from each other when discussing their ideas on a topic.

Summative Assessment

Summative assessments are design to measure student achievement at end of instruction. These types of assessments evaluate student learning at the end of a project, unit, course, or school year. Summative assessment scores are usually recorded and factored into student academic record in the form of letter grades and scores from tests like SAT or ACT.

Summative Assessment Apps and Software

Quizlet: Build flashcards, quizzes, games, and tests in the app. It's free and simple to get started and you have access to the sets created by other users. For $25 per year you can add data tracking, like class progress on the study sets you've created or assigned. You can also add images and voice recording. But even without the bells and whistles, the Quizlet experience makes testing more enjoyable.

tv: Bubblr allows users to create trivia quizzes based on YouTube videos. You can play challenges created by other users, or create your own trivia challenges for students. This site helps students get used to being tested on multi-media stimuli, something that is popular in the Common Core tests.

Other Summative Assessment Ideas

Portfolios: Portfolios allow students to collect evidence of their learning throughout the unit, quarter, semester, or year, rather than being judged on a number from a test taken one time. Education World put together this great article on the use of portfolios as assessment tools, and our own Kristen Hicks hunted down tools that can be used to create digital portfolios back in February of 2015.

Projects: Projects allow students to synthesize many concepts into one product or process. They require students to address real world issues and put their learning to use to solve or demonstrate multiple related skills. For the best information on projects as assessments, check out the Buck Institute for Education's (BIE) Project Based Learning resource list.

Performance Tasks: Performance tasks are like mini-projects. They can be completed in a few hours, yet still require students to show mastery of a broad topic. Inside mathematics put together a fantastic, free set of math performance assessment tasks.

In Short

Until more reform happens, high-stakes assessments and the sheer numbers of tests students are expected to take will continue to be issues of prominent debate in the education world. The future of assessment is online and adaptive. In fact, as we move towards this future, tests will become increasingly precise, meeting students where they are, and pinpointing exactly what they need to learn. With this kind of data-rich precision, assessments should become less frequent in number and in intensity. After all, in the end, the problem is less the idea of testing itself, but how we design them, apply them, and make use of their data. Done the right way, assessments are a great way for educators to better understand their students' progress, because helping students learn is the primary objective of education.

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It's not a stretch to say that assessment is a hot button issue in education; however, you'd be hard pressed to find an educator who doesn't see the value in measuring student progress. Assessments themselves have been vilified, when, in fact, it's why assessments are given and how the data is used that is really the issue.

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We share evidence and practitioner-based learning strategies that empower you to improve K-12 education.

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Assess Teaching & Learning - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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The assignment will be assessed in several ways, in accordance with suggestions by Anderson and Krathwohl (p. 61-62). The metacognitive process is difficult to assess, but can

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By manipulating the words and artifacts, as well as by discussing their words with groups, the students are moving the information from their working memory to their long-term memory.

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Students will use Padlet to collaborate on a dictionary project.

There were quite a few words that the students were not familiar with in the poem, such as "familial."

Students will be put into groups of four. They will find five words with which they are unfamiliar.

Students will use the internet to define and find definitions of the words.

They will also find examples of the word used in text or video.

Students will create a Padlet board with their definitions, in the students' own words, as well as their online artifacts.

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Students will work in groups to create an interactive online dictionary of five terms from the poem.

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Metacognitive knowledge = strategic knowledge, knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge, self-knowledge

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Apply = carry out, implement

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Apply metacognitive knowledge

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The knowledge dimension represents a range from concrete (factual) to abstract (metacognitive) (Table 2). Representation of the knowledge dimension as a number of discrete steps can be a bit misleading. For example, all procedural knowledge may not be more abstract than all conceptual knowledge. And metacognitive knowledge is a special case.

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·As suggested on pg. 252 of Ormrod, the teacher creates a scaffold for the students by providing information to look for in the poem (i.e. the title, the author, the structure).

·On page 198, Ormrod suggests that teachers pose questions for students to ask themselves while reading, which the teacher does at around 5:30 min.  She encourages the students to use metacognition by thinking about how they’re going to problem solve.

·By asking the students what the various aspects of the poem reminds them of, the teacher is encouraging “students to think about classroom subject matter in ways that will help them remember it” (Ormrod, 2011, p. 184).  When students raise their hands to give their connections, the teacher asks them to explain their reasoning.  For example, when it is brought up that the author of the poem could be Mexican, the teacher probes the students as to why theymake that assumption. Ormrod says that teachers should “ask students to explain their reasoning” (p. 184).

·At 8-9:00 minutes, the teacher encourages students to collaborate to create meaning out of their questions, as suggested on page 184 of the Ormrod text.

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Learning strategies are cognitive processes used for a particular learning task (Ormrod, 2011).

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Higher-level = cognitive process that involves going well beyond something specifically learned

Lower-level = cognitive process that involves learning or remembering specific information or skills in more or less the same form in which they were initially presented

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I chose to do my TAP Web 2.0 Project using Padlet because it is an interactive online poster board. Padlet is a great classroom tool because it allows students to collaborate to create board using text, pictures, videos, links, and more. Students can work together on the same Padlet simultaneously, and their updates will be posted in real time. If student Jimmy is sitting next to me on his own computer, his changes show up on my screen as he makes them. For example, I used text, as well as articles and other media to support my point. All of the content has been either cited in text, or has been directly linked on the Padlet.

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Learning facts by rote should be a central part of the school experience, the education secretary, Michael Gove, will argue on Wednesday in a speech which praises traditional exams to the extent of arguing they helped spur the US civil rights struggle.

In the address, titled In Praise of Tests, Gove describes the ideological underpinning to his planned shakeup of GCSEs and A-levels, a philosophy which will further delight educational traditionalists but is likely to prompt criticisms that he is seeking a return to the teaching styles of the 1940s and 50s.

Competitive, difficult exams for which pupils must prepare by memorising large amounts of facts and concepts will promote motivation, solidify knowledge and guarantee standards, Gove is to tell the Independent Academies Association, a trade body for academy schools.

"Exams matter because motivation matters," Gove will say, according to extracts of the speech provided by his department.

"Humans are hard-wired to seek out challenges. And our self-belief grows as we clear challenges we once thought beyond us.

"If we know tests are rigorous, and they require application to pass, then the experience of clearing a hurdle we once considered too high spurs us on to further endeavours and deeper learning."

Gove professes himself a great fan of Daniel Willingham, a US cognitive psychologist who has sought to use scientific research to show pupils learn best through the use of memory and routine, arguments outlined in a book, Why Don't Students Like School?, also popular with free schools guru Toby Young.

Gove argues that "memorisation is a necessary precondition of understanding". He says: "Only when facts and concepts are committed securely to the working memory, so that it is no effort to recall them and no effort is required to work things out from first principles, do we really have a secure hold on knowledge.

"Memorising scales, or times tables, or verse, so that we can play, recall or recite automatically gives us this mental equipment to perform more advanced functions and display greater creativity.

"And the best way to build memory, as Willingham explains, is by the investment of thought and effort - such as the thought and effort we require for exam preparation and testing."

Such exams must be "proper tests", marked externally and with results ranked in league tables, rather than teacher assessment, Gove he argues.

While saying he is "a huge fan" of teacher assessment Gove argues that external tests are more fair, saying evidence shows some ethnic minority children can be under-marked by their own teachers.

He goes on: "With external testing there is no opportunity for such bias - the soft bigotry of low expectations - and tests show ethnic minority students performing better.

"So external tests are not only a way of levelling the playing field for children of all backgrounds they are a solvent of prejudice."

In a passage which could raise some eyebrows, Gove draws a parallel with the US civil rights movement of the 1960s. He says: "In America the use of scholastic aptitude tests opened up access to colleges which had in the past arbitrarily blocked minority students.

"The academic test was a tool of the civil rights struggle. Colleges which had used quotas to limit, say, the number of Jewish students or placed undue reliance on lineage and connections in allocating places had to accept students on the basis of test scores and real ability. Andin this country, over the last few years, tests have also helped overcome prejudice and advance equality."

Gove has already made plain his preference for rigorous, one-off exam assessments for pupils, rather than modular courses.

In September he startled his Liberal Democrat coalition partners with plans for GCSEs to be replaced by a more traditional qualification graded on a single, end-of-couse exam.

The proposed English baccalaureate successor to A-levels would also do away with modular systems. The plans have drawn fierce opposition from, among others, teaching unions, who say the concept risks writing off the chances of many pupils.

In his speech Gove argues that the reverse is true and that exams "help those who need support to do better to know what support they need".

Among other benefits, the speech says, is increased pupil satisfaction: "We know that happiness comes from earned success. There is no feeling of satisfaction as deep, or sustained, as knowing we have succeeded through hard work at a task which is the upper end, or just beyond, our normal or expected level of competence."

The corollary of this, he stresses, is that a proportion of pupils must fail: "For all these reasons exams pitched at a level which all can easily pass are worse than no exams at all. Unless there is stretch in the specification, and application is required to succeed, there will be no motivation, no satisfaction and no support for those who need it."

Memorising facts was an important part of education, particularly in primary schools with things such as times tables, said Jacek Brant, head of the department of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment at The Institute of Education.

He said: "But the problem with rote learning in a secondary school setting is that you need to understand context. if there's no meaning, no understanding of any benefit, then pupils' learning will be poor.

"If there's a pattern, and they can see the purpose of the learning, the learning will be stronger and better. Rote learning, say, names of cities and rivers for its own sake is not very good.

"But having them on a map with a historical context or something like that the students will see why they're important and learn them better."
Topics

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Tough exams and learning by rote are the keys to success, says Michael Gove

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Learning facts by rote should be a central part of the school experience, the education secretary, Michael Gove, will argue on Wednesday in a speech which praises traditional exams to the extent of arguing they helped spur the US civil rights struggle.

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Mr Nabawi, a history and geography teacher in a boys' school in Imbaba, a poor district of Cairo, does not hide his impatience when asked if his pupils are set assignments that require research on the internet.

"There is no time or scope to ask for such things," he says dismissively. "There is only the curriculum and studying it. If I ask for research, they will not finish it. There are 40, 50 and even 60 pupils in a classroom here. They are ignorant and the internet makes them even more ignorant."

The teacher, who would not give his full name, had stepped out of the school gates to negotiate private tuition with a mother for her son.

In an overstretched educational system that places little premium on students' ability to think for themselves, private tutors help students to memorise curriculums that are often verbose and mind-numbing. They provide model answers that the children are encouraged to memorise and regurgitate on their answer sheets.

Stodgy curricula, overcrowded schools and a reliance on private tutoring are not uniquely Egyptian woes. Across the Arab world, state education is in crisis, say teachers, commentators and parents.

The problems are less acute in some countries: Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates do well in global rankings of educational standards. But elsewhere in the region, state education systems from school to university are in dire need of an overhaul.

Overstretched and underfunded national systems produce large numbers of poorly educated graduates seeking desk jobs in the civil service and generally lacking the dynamism and skills needed by the private sector, employers complain. The qualities valued in modern economies - such as initiative, creativity and problem-solving abilities - are in short supply, they say.

The 2013 Global Competitiveness Report, which is based on surveys of business leaders, places Egypt at the bottom of 148 countries, ranked according to the quality of their primary education. Yemen is second last while Algeria and Libya rank at 131 and 132.

According to the Education for All Global Monitoring Report published by Unesco, primary school education in the Arab world is often "not of sufficient quality" to ensure that all students learn the basics. A 2007 study found that 53 per cent of Egyptian children in the eighth grade (aged 13 and 14) failed to achieve even the lowest international benchmark in mathematics.

Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All report, says that 35 per cent of Arab children who reach fourth grade do not meet minimum standards of "reading with understanding" and have not mastered basic mathematical operations.

"I don't think one would say the results are good anywhere in the Arab world", she says. "Jordan was doing better, but recent [studies] show it has not improved and has instead worsened a bit." In a region with half its population under the age of 24, resources are overstretched and class sizes are often too huge for teachers to attend to individual students. The pressure to make places available for the next cohort of pupils means that even those who deserve to fail are given pass grades to speed them through.

"There are students who make it to the final year at school, but are still barely able to read," says Nayra Ijjeh, an education consultant in Egypt. "They pass because of collective cheating, with teachers sometimes standing outside exam rooms and shouting answers into megaphones."

She cites poorly trained teachers and badly designed curricula as other problems, but says she does come across good schools, principals and teachers, who "succeed despite the system, not because of it".

Critics note that one of the main shortcomings of education in Egypt, and elsewhere in the Arab world, is a dependence on rote learning, which fails to instil the ability to think critically - a prerequisite for progress and innovation.

"The notion [underlying university education in Egypt] is that there is a finite amount of knowledge," says Khaled Fahmy, a professor of history at the American University in Cairo. "So there is a standard text book that has to be taught and students have to acquire that information. The absence of libraries means there is little research. The professor delivers a lecture which is a repetition of the set text book for the course which he has written and the students are examined on this information."

Hany al-Husseiny, a professor of mathematics at Cairo University, complains that the system is exam driven and that there is pressure on staff to pass as many students as possible, regardless of attainment. The faculty where he teaches is not much in demand by students, because scientific research in Egypt is mostly in government institutions, which pay low salaries.

"Science in our country is seen as marginal and even a bit eccentric," he says. "The moneymaking potential is limited. Most of the students are here because their grades did not take them anywhere else, so they are not motivated.

"But we view our mission as to pick the few clever ones in the first year, get them out of rote-learning mode and give them a good education."

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Bias towards rote learning stifles critical thinking

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Mr Nabawi, a history and geography teacher in a boys' school in Imbaba, a poor district of Cairo, does not hide his impatience when asked if his pupils are set assignments that require research on the internet. "There is no time or scope to ask for such things," he says dismissively.

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Rote learning is a process by which information is stored in long-term memory. Ormrod (2011) defines it as "learning information in a relatively uninterpreted form, without making sense of it or attaching much meaning to it" (p. 191).

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Among the countless catchphrases that educators generally despise are "drill-'n-kill" and "rote memorization." In keeping with their meanings, both sound terrifically unpleasant. To learn something "by rote," according to the Random House dictionary, is to learn it "from memory, without thought of the meaning; in a mechanical way."

The fear is that we're turning our children into automatons by force-feeding them useless bits of information -- facts that can be found instantly on Wikipedia, like the dates of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) or the equation for calculating the area of a circle (πr ²).

But is it possible that memorizing things is actually underrated in modern American society? Could one make a convincing case that it's not just useful but vital for people of all ages to memorize things?

The answer to both of these questions, I believe, is yes. And a recent discussion on the BAM! Radio Network in which I participated focused on this very topic -- the value of rote memorization. The conversation, hosted by Rae Pica, featured Daniel Willingham (a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia), Joan Almon (executive director of the Alliance for Childhood) and me.

Because "rote" learning and "memorization" have negative connotations for most people, it might be better to speak of learning things by heart. And, as Willingham points out in our discussion, learning things by heart is something children automatically do. That is, it comes naturally to them -- whether it's being able to recall all the words to a nursery rhyme or knowing the plot of a story (if not the story itself, word for word) before one is actually able to read. Willingham says that the key is engagement: "If you're really engaged, memory comes pretty automatically."

Learning things by heart can be useful for any number of reasons, some of which we discuss in the radio show. As an English teacher, I've often made my students memorize poetry -- and just as often some have pushed back, accusing me of assigning meaningless "busy work." I love that accusation because it provides me the perfect opportunity to explain why memorizing a poem is, in fact, a worthwhile activity. And here's a little-known secret: learning things by heart isn't as hard as many people imagine.

For inspiration on the memorization front, check out the video below of a three-year-old reciting Billy Collins' poem "Litany." This serves as a lovely reminder of what the human brain is capable of. (Notice what the young child's intonation on certain lines reveals: he hasn't learned this poem "without thought of the meaning; in a mechanical way" -- Random House's definition of "rote" learning. He's wiser and more aware of what he's saying than many of us might initially think.)

Here are some of the reasons I give skeptical students for why learning things by heart is worthwhile:

First, it's a challenge, and one in which those who succeed can take pride.

Second, it's good exercise for your brain. Many people these days seem to believe that our digital devices will remember everything for us -- and they will, but they're not much help when we can't find them, or they're broken, or they've been left at home. How will you call your best friend to reschedule that lunch appointment -- you don't even know her phone number! And she's your best friend?

Third, and most importantly, new insights are gained in the process of memorization. You see things to which you were previously blind; you uncover a play on words, assonance, alliteration, analogies. It is for this reason, I believe, that the great Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov declared that there's actually no such thing as reading -- there's only re-reading. ("Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader," Nabokov wrote in his Lectures on Literature.)

The same holds for T.V. shows and movies: you see so much more on a second, third and fourth viewing. You don't truly see anything the first time you watch it. And this applies no less to music: hearing something for the first time is more akin to hearing it not at all than to truly hearing it. The work is too new, too unknown, to us; we can't make heads or tails of it because we suffer from sensory overload.

It's only with multiple readings, viewings and hearings that we actually begin to understand, see and hear. We're deaf and blind in our first encounters with things.

And this is why practice matters so much as well. It's our chief hope for transcending mediocrity.

We say "practice makes perfect" in English but this, I think, is somewhat misleading because perfection is rarely attainable. There's no such thing as a "perfect" performance of a Beethoven sonata. And while perfection in sports isn't inconceivable -- I suppose a tennis player could win a match in straight sets without dropping a single point -- it's highly unlikely. Thus, I prefer the German version of the saying: "practice makes the master." Those who are the best at things typically become so through nonstop practice. It's not the only factor, of course -- natural ability matters hugely, too -- but it does seem to be a necessary ingredient. As Amy Chua, of "Tiger Mother" fame, says in her new book: "Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America."

Why are rote repetition and memorization underrated in America? As I say on the radio show, they've gotten a bad rap in part because they lend themselves too well to standardized testing. It's much easier -- faster, cheaper -- for me to determine whether you know when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) than whether you can convincingly explain how and why the Treaty of Versailles set the stage for World War II. Yes, the curriculum has narrowed (even Arne Duncan admits it!), the "what-gets-tested-is-what-gets-taught" phenomenon is very much alive, and there's a lack of critical-thinking skills among today's young people.

These sad facts, however, are more the result of our over-reliance on multiple-choice tests than anything inherently evil about repetition or memorization.

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Rote Memorization: Overrated or Underrated?

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Among the countless catchphrases that educators generally despise are "drill-'n-kill" and "rote memorization." In keeping with their meanings, both sound terrifically unpleasant. To learn something "by rote," according to the Random House dictionary, is to learn it "from memory, without thought of the meaning; in a mechanical way."

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Memory is a key component in cognitive theory. Working memory is the part of memory that holds what the person is actively thinking about. It can only process a limited amount of information, and lasts for only 5-20 seconds (Ormrod, 2011, 187).

Long-term memory is where knowledge, memories, and skills are held for a long time. Different kinds of knowledge are held in long-term memory, such as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge (Ormrod, 2011, 191).

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Learning, as defined in terms of cognitive theory, is a "long-term change in mental representations or associations as a result of experience" (Ormrod, 2011, p. 180).