It’s Time To Fix Testing
Testing is everywhere, but it’s flawed and in dire need of a replacement. Here are some ideas.
Finals week. It’s a phrase that high schoolers and middle schoolers across the country dread, and it’s associated with memories of pulling all-nighters studying and spending days upon days in stuffy classrooms filling out bubble sheets.
My school recently had its finals, and coming from a private middle school, it was the first time I experienced it.
As I went through all of this, there was a thought in the back of my mind that this seemed wrong. There was no way that these tests were the best way to get an accurate assessment of my knowledge, and spending days of academic time that could be spent teaching felt unnecessary.
Eventually, this feeling turned into a question: what’s wrong with testing and how can we improve it? I took this question and began researching, trying to get an answer, and the following is what I found.
Why Do We Test?
Before I could address the problems with current tests or how to fix them, I had to find out why we test students to begin with.
The most common answer I got was that it’s used to assess the knowledge of students and figure out how to help them. Especially with standardized tests, we can use the results to know what level the student taking it is at, and also what level the school is at. With that information on hand, we can direct resources and attention at schools and student groups that are having the most trouble on these tests.
This means that students and schools who need help the most are able to get it, which is definitely a good thing.
Tests can also be a good tool for teachers. Tests can provide teachers with diagnostic feedback, such as which students know and what they still need to be taught, and the teacher can use that to plan what they’re going to teach in the future.
Evaluating progress is also a big advantage of tests. If they’re taken at regular intervals, they can tell teachers and districts how much the students are learning over time, and what methods are working versus what methods aren’t.
Now, these all seem like very compelling reasons for why we should be testing students, but we also have to look at the problems with testing, because according to experts, there are a lot of them.
The Flaws With Testing
TEACH Magazine did an interview with a design professor at the Auckland University of Technology named Welby Ings, who had many criticisms regarding current tests.
The first is that tests assess performance over knowledge. What this means is that the tests are made in a way that doesn’t assess a student’s knowledge very well, but instead assesses their ability to take the test. Being a good test taker is different than being a good student, and you can do well on most tests without actually learning and internalizing what you’re being taught.
Tests can also promote unnecessary competition. Most tests fall under the category of a diagnostic assessment, which I mentioned earlier, and those are fine. They’re used to find out which students know what, and can be used to direct teaching efforts. The problem testing here is something called comparative assessments.
Comparative assessments will test students and then rank them based on their scores. The most common form of this is curved tests, where a student’s grade will be determined based on how they did relative to their peers.
This is counterproductive to learning, as it encourages students to try to just be better than their classmates on the test, not actually learn the material they’re being taught.
Certain types of students can also be harmed by the way current tests work. Tests are usually done in class, have to be finished within a limited amount of time and involve circling multiple choice answers, filling in blanks, or some other form of regurgitating information.
This demand for rapid fire answers can harm more reflective students, who need a lot of time to think and develop their answers. These students work better with tests that are open ended, or ask more in-depth, complex questions, and they’re being stifled by the way we test them now.
Even if you’re excelling with tests, however, it could mean bad news. Students who do well on these kinds of tests can develop tunnel vision as a result, only caring about their grade and ignoring all feedback and chances for improvement along the way.
Again, this can mean that students aren’t really internalizing information. They’re simply learning it for the test and then forgetting about it, which defeats the entire purpose of school.
Alternative Tests
So, now we have to ask: how can we fix testing? If current testing is so flawed, what is a better way that we can assess students’ knowledge and still have all of the information we get from traditional test results?
Dr. Rhonda Dubec of Lakehead University has a few ideas.
The first is an essay. Essays in the school setting usually have a couple prompts that pertain to subjects covered during a unit, one of which the students have to pick and then answer.
Essays are already used in many schools. A lot of teachers will have you write some kind of essay throughout the unit and turn it in at the end, while some teachers will even have essay exams, where the entire test is you answering a prompt about the unit.
These are great because they require a lot more thought on the student’s part. With a normal multiple choice test, you just need to know a factual answer to a question or be good at process of elimination, but essays require for you to pick a prompt, make a thesis to answer the prompt, think of reasons for why your thesis is correct and find evidence to support your reasons.
All of this requires an in-depth understanding of the topic you’re writing about, meaning you can’t fake or cheat your way around an essay, and it’s a lot harder to write it properly without understanding the unit.
Essays can still provide information on what a students knows and what they need to be taught in the future, and they have the bonus of being able to be done outside of class, meaning that you don’t have to waste time in class reviewing for and administering a written test and can instead spend class time teaching new information.
In the same vein, you can also have students write briefs.
While essays are usually more specific, addressing one part of a unit, briefings are more general and summarize the entire unit. Again, these require for a student to have a solid base of knowledge surrounding the unit, as they have to discuss everything that was taught during it.
You can also use presentations or poster sessions to assess students. These would likely be similar to essays, except instead of being written, students would have to make a visual to accompany their points, and they have to give a presentation to the class.
Along with being better at checking a student’s knowledge, these would also help students with public speaking skills and design skills, which are very valuable.
Now, all of the things I’ve mentioned so far are already done to some extent at most schools, but this next one is a little less common, and to me it seems like the best way to test students: a student proposed project. With these, instead of you deciding what the students will make, you let them pick.
You can do this be either giving a few project options and letting students choose from them, or leaving it completely open and having students dictate every aspect of their project, given that it fulfills certain requirements. This is great for students, as normal tests and projects restrict them to doing a certain thing, and here, you’re letting them make projects that work for them and can showcase their unique skills.
Letting students choose their assignment can also make them connect more with the project and what they’ve learned, making them more likely to remember what they’ve been taught.
Now, I’ll admit, none of these methods are perfect. They can still miss some things, and they’ll still get messed up by slackers and cheaters, but they’re a lot better at measuring how much students actually know than current tests, and they can make students more interested in what’s being taught.
These methods of testing also build vital skills within the students, such as personal responsibility, planning, critical thinking, communication, decision making and knowledge of how to use technology to get results. You don’t get these skills when you just have to sit in a room for an hour and fill in a bubble sheet.
Conclusion
It seems fair to say that current testing is flawed. While it’s useful for getting diagnostic information about students and how to help them, it also isn’t very good at measuring actual student knowledge, just their test taking ability. This kind of testing can harm students who aren’t made to produce information like that, and for students who are good at it, it can create tunnel vision where the only thing that matters is their grade on the test, and they beginning learning for the test, not because they want to learn.
Fortunately, there are many better alternatives. A lot of them are assigned as projects that students are already required to do, like essays and presentations, but they could easily take the place of tests, and knock out days of review and testing as a necessity in modern classrooms.
If alternatives were instated on a massive scale, it would greatly increase the quality of testing and ensure that tests do what they were supposed to: understand how much knowledge a student has.
Sources
[1] Dubec, Rhonda. “13 Alternatives to Traditional Testing.” Lakehead University Teaching Commons, 13 Nov. 2018, https://teachingcommons.lakeheadu.ca/13-alternatives-traditional-testing. Accessed Jan. 2019.
[2] Gillmore, Meagan. “The Problem With Standardized Testing.” TEACH Magazine, http://teachmag.com/archives/9990. Accessed Jan. 2019.
[3] “Why Is Assessment Important?” Edutopia, 15 July 2008, https://www.edutopia.org/assessment-guide-importance. Accessed Jan. 2019.
[4] “Why Is Project-Based Learning Important?” Edutopia, 19 Oct. 2007, https://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning-guide-importance. Accessed Jan. 2019.
[5] Wright, Lane. “Why Do We Need Standardized Tests?” New York School Talk, 30 May 2018, http://newyorkschooltalk.org/2018/05/need-standardized-tests/. Accessed Jan. 2019.
