The Revival of Testing in Soviet Union

The editors of SOVIET EDUCATION select material for translation from more than thirty-five Soviet periodicals and newspapers, and occasionally from books.а The journals are concerned with Soviet preschool, primary, secondary, vocational, and higher education; curricula and methods of the subject fields taught in the schools: the pedagogy of art, music, and physical education; and special education programs for abnormal children.а Journals and newspapers of the Communist Party, the Komsomol and Pioneer organizations, the Soviet ministries of education and higher education, and the teachers' unions are also covered, as well as popular educational magazines for children, young people, and parents.

The materials selected are intended to reflect developments in Soviet educational theory and practice and to be of interest to those professionally concerned with this field.

Editor: Beatrice Beach Szekely Assistant Editor: Janet Lincoln, M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Translator: Michel Vale

ADVISORY COMMITTEE: Harold J. Noah, Chairman, Teachers College, Columbia University; George Z. F. Bereday, Columbia University; William W. Brickman, University of Pennsylvania; Nicholas DeWitt, Indiana University; Richard B. Dobson, Uniнversity of Colorado; William H. E. Johnson, University of Pittsburgh; Seymour M. Rosen

Publisher: Myron E. Sharpe Editorial Director: Arnold C. Tovell Slavic Editor: A. Joseph Hollander Business Manager:а Blanche Broder Production Manager: Theresa Hughes Advertising Manager: Diane Glazer

Twelve issues per year.аа Subscription rate:а S204.00; for individuals associated with subscribing institutions, certifying that subscription is for personal use, $55.00.

И 1980 by M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 901 North Broadway, White Plains, New York 10603.аа All rights reserved.аа Articles in this issue are translated by arrangement with VAAP. the USSR Copyright Agency.аа ISSN 0038-5360

The articles in this journal are listed in Current Contents: Behavioral, Social and Educational Sciences.

THE REVIVAL OF TESTING AND MEASUREMENT IN SOVIET SCHOOLING

Editor's Introduction

Psychological testing was abolished in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1930s. In 1936, a Communist Party decree condemned the entire field of child study, or pedology, for its excessive use of IQ tests, modeled on those developed in the West by Binet and others, to measure the abilities of Soviet schoolchildren. Test results had been interpreted as indicative of low ability levels among the children of non-Russian nationality and minority groups within the USSR Ч an interpretation that conflicted with the educational policies of the Stalin government, which insisted that all but a very small number of severely retarded or mentally handicapped school-age youth were able to meet the academic standards set for the state school system.

For more than forty years, there have been no tests of general, intellectual abilities or potential in the Soviet Union. With correct teaching, official policy has asserted, all pupils can learn the common school curriculum, and poor instruction has been held accountable for most failures to learn. Educational measurement and evaluation have been limited to year-end promotion and school-leaving examinations, and achievement tests whose results have been used to evaluate teaching styles and techniques as well as pupil knowledge.

Soviet educational research, as a consequence, has been focused largely on the teaching Ч rather than the learning Ч aspect of schooling in a search for effective ways and means the teacher can employ to bring all pupils up to the standard level of achievement. School pupils have been treated as the raw material of education who, when given the right learning environment, can develop desired abilities and skills. Emphasis on the responsibility of schooling for child development coincides, of course, with the Marxist belief that societal, environmental factors, rather than inherited or congenital characteristics, determine what one can achieve in-life. In Soviet pedagogy and psychology, heredity is acknowledged as a force, but the social milieu Ч in childhood, the family and the school Ч is considered predominant.

Today, an intriguing revival of measurement and evaluation is occurring in Soviet education. The articles translated in this issue of Soviet Education represent the tip of the iceberg of this phenomenon, and speculation as to why and how this revival is taking place is irresistible. A major reason is that posed implicitly in the lead article by V. S. Avanesov, a sociologist at the USSR Academy of Sciences.а Avanesov reviews obliquely the history of testing and measurement in the USSR, sidestepping a description of the political purges of the child study movement and its major spokesmen under Stalin. The realization seems to have been made that improvement of the Soviet school system at the present simply demands efficient mass testing procedures that measure more than pupil mastery of hard facts from the large body of information contained in Soviet school syllabuses and textbooks.

The Soviet school curriculum has been comprehensively overhauled in the last fifteen years, and the traditional emphasis of Soviet pedagogy on memorization, or rote learning, has been replaced by a new interest in pupil reasoning and thought that stresses independent study rather than rigid instruction. To evaluate the results of work with the new school programs, new mass testing devices are necessary, and there is a tremendous new interest in the evaluation of cognitive abilнities and skills. To be sure, IQ-type tests of overall ability will not be adopted in the USSR.а The assumption continues to prevail that all pupils can be made to master the state school curriculum, and there will be no attempts Ч at least not explicitly Ч to compare the achievements of groups of school youth in terms of social factors, economic advantages, and naнtional minority status.а Unlike in the United States, in the USSR these sensitive questions can be avoided entirely by political edict.

But there is an important shift in Soviet pedagogy away from the longstanding preoccupation with uniform teaching methods and techniques to an interest in how individual school pupils study and learn.а The overall development of each pupil Ч development conceived in terms of cognitive or intellectual growth Ч is the new catchword.а Educational psychology is moving from its forty-year concentration on teaching to attention on the learner.а Child study Ч in the broad sense Ч is not being resurrected from the ashes of the pedology purge, but learning psychology has become ascendant.а And testing is being called into play to investigate the learning process and to discover how pupils learn concepts and theories and acquire general intellectual skills.

Significantly, work in Soviet educational psychology that was condemned in the aftermath of the pedology purge has been revived. Work by Lev Vygotsky and his world-renowned school of learning psychology that remained unpublished in the 1940s and early 1950s is now widely acknowledged as the major theoretical foundation of Soviet educational research.а The articles by Iu. Z. Gil'bukh in this issue describe how the revived Soviet test and measurement field is addressing the issues of validation and reliability within the limits established for this revival.а Gil'bukh is associated with the Institute of Psychology of the Ukrainian SSR in Kiev, where much of the new Soviet work seems to be taking place. Aside from the study of how pupils learn the regular school program, the use of testing for vocational guidance is a new, hot item in Soviet research. There will be a great deal published on testing and measurement in the USSR in coming years.а Interest among Soviet colleagues in Western and particularly American research is keen.

B. B. S.