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Below, we will show that these are false dichotomies. Advances in test design
allow for a reevaluation of what is generally considered as possible and prefer-
able for mass education and its testing infrastructure. After discussing the approach
we have adopted for designing tests based on the new science of learning, we will
return to some of the broad evaluative questions and discuss how we understand the
implications of these innovations.
Advances in Developmental Science and the Birth
of the DiscoTest Initiative
James Mark Baldwin (1906) was the first psychologist to offer a complex view of
human development in which a variety of different
learning sequences
unfold across
qualitatively distinct developmental levels. This set an important agenda for devel-
opment science, wherein a
learning sequence
is defined as an empirically grounded
reconstruction of the levels or phases undergone during the acquisition of a specific
capability, concept, or understanding. Decades after Baldwin, Heinz, Werner (1957)
and Jean Piaget (1932) would also offer theories of human development in which
learning sequences figured prominently. Eventually, Kohlberg (1984) would build
learning sequences in the moral domain, King and Kitchener (1994) in reflective
judgment, Case (1992) in several knowledge areas, Watson and Fischer (1980) for
social roles, and Siegler (1981) in mathematics, with many others following suit.
For over a century researchers have been creating new methods and building empir-
ically grounded models of specific learning sequences in a wide variety of domains.
This general approach to researching development and learning continues to pro-
duce knowledge, with an increasing focus on individual differences and educational
implications (Stein, 2009).
As a part of this tradition, Fischer's
Dynamic Skill Theory
(Fischer, 1980;
Fischer & Bidell, 2006) has added a generative set of methods and concepts useful
for researching and modeling learning sequences. First outlined in the 1980s, the
General Skill Scale (Fig. 10.2) is the backbone of the general approach. The Skill
Scale is a model of the basic structural transformations characteristic of skill devel-
opment and has been empirically refined in light of decades of research. Importantly,
in this context the term
skill
should be taken in a very general sense, as the basic
or generic unit of psychological process. All skills are richly multidimensional,
intrinsically involving emotion, cognition, context, and social support. Skills are
built actively and dynamically by individuals in specific contexts and they are built
hierarchically, with more complex ones transcending but including less complex
ones. As individuals build unique skills in different domains, learning sequences
unfold across the different tiers and levels:
actions
lay the groundwork for concrete
representations
, which serve eventually as the basis for the construction of
abstrac-
tions
. Within each tier, there is a series of levels, as the basic skill-type (action,
representation, or abstraction) is coordinated into increasingly complex forms of
organized behavior.
