December 2001 — Industry Perspective

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Testing, Testing ... Does Anybody Know Why?

Have schools gone test crazy? With accountability the watchword of the day, it sometimes seems that way. But the purpose of all this testing should be to help instructors improve their teaching and to help learners progress. Yet, all too often, that seems to be the least important purpose for tests; and many times the tests used can't generate information instructors can really use.

To see why, let's take a look at the way one teacher, Mrs. Anthony, uses tests for different purposes:

- At the beginning of the school year, Mrs. Anthony gives her class a pretest. It tells her which learners are ready to study what parts of the curriculum, and gives her a detailed diagnostic skill profile for each learner. She uses that information to decide how to individualize instruction for each learner.

- Each lesson includes a progress test or other assessment activity. It tells Mrs. Anthony and her learners how well they understand the lesson, and what they need to review before going on.

- At the end of each unit, Mrs. Anthony gives a summative test, which lets her see the big picture of how her learners grasped the major themes and skills in the unit. Then, she can decide what individual review work her learners need before they go on to the next unit.

- Each spring, her school system administers a certification test based on state curriculum standards for her class. It shows how well her class has mastered the state standards, but d'esn't provide detailed diagnostic information for her to use. In fact, the test results don't even come back until after the end of the school year.

Defining the Tests

Often, tests create more heat than light when it comes to data-driven teaching decisions. To see why, let's look at what's in each kind of test:

Pretests. There are two kinds of pretests. Both are criterion-referenced, so they include a sample of questions that represent your curriculum:

- Pretests for Readiness. These check for mastery of prerequisites to a given part of the curriculum. It's useful for deciding where to start learners in an individualized curriculum.

- Pretests for Need. This is a version of the summative test. In an individualized curriculum, you can use it to decide if a learner should skip a given part of the curriculum.

Lesson Quiz and Mastery Tests. These are the short criterion-referenced tests that are embedded in day-to-day instruction. Their purpose is to check the understanding of a specific detailed learning objective, and to provide immediate feedback to instructors and learners to help them decide what to study next.

Summative Tests. These are the relatively long unit tests and final exams written by you or your district. They are administered at the end of a large block of instruction, and often are used as the basis of a grade. Typically they are a competency-based sample of the highest-level objectives of the curriculum. Point scores, percentage scores and grades are the most common means of reporting results, though it's also common to report back which items each learner got wrong.