Teaching Without Testing

Teaching without Testing: Assessing the Complexity of Children’s Literacy Learning by Denny Taylor is the second book in Garn Press Women Scholars Series.  This book revisits Taylor’s seminal and influential work based on her Biographic Literacy Profiles Project. Teaching without Testing: Assessing the Complexity of Children’s Literacy Learning is a timely book that challenges the scientific assumptions of standardized testing in developing effective instruction to meet the literate lives of all students. Through detailed observations of student learning, Taylor encourages readers to consider alternative ways of assessing children’s reading and writing based on observable literacy behaviors. Supporting a humanistic perspective to the education of children, Taylor argues that standardized and diagnostic methods of assessment and teaching, based on test-driven, cooperate-led accountability practices, have detrimental effects on children and result in the de-professionalization of teachers. 3