Why are the Invalsi tests controversial again?
The long (and tormented) history of the utility and management of the Invalsi has been going on for more than 20 years, yet it has never been possible to find the right solution. Also due to populism, present on all sides. Commentary by Tiziana Pedrizzi for the Anna Kuliscioff Foundation
In rules concerning the implementation of the PNRR, the idea of pairing and therefore comparing the final exam grade for students with their results in the 5th year Invalsi tests has resurfaced. The controversy immediately raged and there are those who openly hope that passage through Parliament through appropriate amendments will erase the unfortunate initiative.
It's a long story… as the title of a beautiful book by Günter Grass stated.
It is known that in the now more than 20 years of their existence the Invalsi tests have gone through numerous storms, even if no one has ever had the courage to propose them in a legislative context (not in electoral rallies where promises/threats in this sense have abounded) 'total abolition. The fault or merit of the international context, where tests of this kind are now in common use, both in sample and census form, in numerous fields of learning. And therefore to deviate dramatically from it would have given yet another sign of the (let's say so) Italian peculiarities.
But the tests in the final years of the courses (3 middle school and 5 high school) have suffered more storms than the others due to the delicacy of their positioning.
Let's start with the eighth grade exam. For a certain period, the results of the Invalsi tests became part of the preparatory score for the final (in adjective) judgment. This has always been poorly digested by associations of teachers and principals, even if it is not clear to what extent, on a topic like this, as well as on other topics, their opinions actually represent those of teachers and principals as a whole.
The reasons are not as concrete as those relating to the 5th year – which we will see later – because the Italian judgment does not weigh in any way on the choices of subsequent paths, unlike for example in France where it has a binding nature. It is a question of principle or image.
This intrusion of the Invalsi tests was judged by the associations mentioned above as a vulnerability to the judging power of the school which is not subject to any external verification and contribution. In reality, analyzes conducted by Invalsi itself in the person of the researcher Angela Martini and also publicly presented demonstrated that the school's judgments were essentially not changed, except for the top levels in which evidently it often happens that an overall judgment on the student also takes into account behavioral factors etc. who overcome some limits in specific skills in the cognitive areas analyzed by Invalsi.
Moreover, what the climate is in matters of evaluation in the world of pedagogists and even in that of middle managers in school administration can easily be deduced from the current controversies relating to the proposed return to numerical grading. There are those who consider the use of terms that indicate a clear insufficiency to be harmful to human rights, those who evoke psychological havoc in cases of negative evaluations, there are those who fear and certify insurmountable anxiety attacks in cases of the deprecated and demonized "evaluation summative” that is, of numbers or defining adjectives.
While the so-called formative evaluation, i.e. during construction and aimed at indicating strengths and limitations for the purposes of improvement, is exalted in contrast. As if the two things should not and cannot be absolutely complementary! Italian pedagogy has become the exaltation of Toyland, where nothing remotely challenging or – God forbid – painful must penetrate. However, it thundered so much that it rained. In the end, the Invalsi eighth grade test was removed from the "judging" body of the exam and runs parallel to it, being mostly ignored by the high schools where the students land.
The issue of tests in the 5th grade exam was even more complex. It took several years to get there, also for serious technical reasons: the lack of authoritative points of reference at an international level, the difficulty of preparing tests for different types of schools which in the 5th year necessarily diversified the expected levels of competence, even in basic skills.
But the main problem has always been that of the eighth grade exam. In or out? In the end it was decided to go outside as a measure, for some a landing place, for others a necessary transition. Then began the battle over: mandatory or not? Those against it – the Grillini in the front row – wanted not only that it not count towards the exam grade, but also that students were not required to take it to take the exam. Evidently counting on mass desertion. It's a shame that instead the graduates took the test – on PC, with an individual administration, in a certain period of the year – en masse, reaching percentages above 95%. And that ever-increasing percentages began to download the results individually and confidentially, even if there was no possible use and regulated value of the same.
In the meantime, however, another phenomenon was going on, probably at the root of the current proposal to make the presentation of the Invalsi results together with those of the high school diploma public through mandatory certification.
Thanks to the data collection that began at the beginning of the 2000s, first on a voluntary level – the famous Conchiglia! software – then mandatory and generalized, you had a precise image of the exam scores. And here, for at least a decade there has been no going wrong: the ranking of the Italian regions in the merit of 100 and 100 cum laude presents curious results.
The regions consistently at the top of the Invalsi tests (Lombardy and Veneto alternate) are last in the honors. While the last ones in the tests are at the top of the honors (Calabria, Campania, Puglia alternate here). The last will be first, says the evangelical saying.
Some naive people believed that highlighting this curious phenomenon would attenuate it: no way. But what is the point of doping in such an obvious way? Apart from the small cash prize established in the early 2000s by Minister Fioroni and still maintained in the name of merit(?!).
In reality, the famous and always mentioned legal value of the qualification exists only to the extent that the Constitution reserves access to public positions to holders of qualifications (without specifying the level). For everything else, no rule obliges any employer, not even a public one, or any university to use the different high school diploma scores to assign different scores in the scoring tables attached to the notices. This would perhaps be the simplest way to defuse the problem.
The one now hypothesized, i.e. making the result of the Invalsi tests public and evident alongside that of the final exam, is equally, if not more effective.
But it's an old story. About 10 years ago, a consultation meeting of the Associations was held at the then MIUR to hear their opinion on what to do with the Invalsi results: nothing (as was later done) or put them on the back, put them in an attachment? The difference underlying the two last hypotheses should not be overlooked.
However, the associations in favor of their valorization were in a clear minority. Then the populist wave arrived and the discussion ended there. We'll see if some mischievous hand will now come to work in the amendment. Populism, we know, is present on all sides.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/invalsi/ on Sat, 16 Mar 2024 07:05:17 +0000.