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A new book review on Salon.com asks: “Why Can’t We Concentrate?” The author’s answers won’t surprise you: the internet, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, ipods and many other electronic distractions are eroding our attention spans, she writes. One could add another culprit: Standardized tests that prize short answers over extended essays or projects.

I don’t mean to knock standardized assessment, which is important for a host of reasons. But the kind of assessment on the cheap that favors easily scored multiple-choice questions over open response items hardly encourages sustained reflection. In the meantime, extended research papers and senior projects have gone the way of vinyl records--assuming they were ever that prevalent.

It won’t be easy, but we have to invest much more aggressively in far better assessments, including assessments of students’ ability to do substantive projects that require sustained attention.

And who knows? Maybe such assessments would give educators all the more incentive to turn those potentially distracting technologies into tools for good rather than evil.