My experience with my kids education (Oregon, 4th and 6th) is that there is some standardized testing but there's a ton of hands-on project work. In fact, I think there's maybe too little rigor and too many poster boards and research projects. They definitely learn how to develop ideas, research and present them, that's great.
An area that's underdeveloped is teaching to sift through available information and figure out what's signal and what's noise. I don't know if standard tests could help with that but encouraging close reading and deep thinking about very specific questions is definitely a worthy goal.
An area that's underdeveloped is teaching to sift through available information and figure out what's signal and what's noise. I don't know if standard tests could help with that but encouraging close reading and deep thinking about very specific questions is definitely a worthy goal.