December 2001 — Industry Perspective

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Testing, Testing ... Does Anybody Know Why?

Certification Tests. These are the long statewide tests administered one to three times per year, at two or three grade levels. They often are used to control promotion to the next grade or graduation. Some are criterion-referenced, but some are norm-referenced tests, which allow you to compare your learners' performance against a national comparison group.

 

Testing Problems

I see four problems with all this testing. First, the tests often are out of alignment with each other and the curriculum. When this happens, the information they provide is actually misleading to both instructors and learners. Using the test scores to make instructional decisions can actually make things worse. Second, the certification and summative tests rarely provide timely information that is detailed enough for instructors to use in making decisions about what to do with particular learners. Third, the more often you test, the bigger the mound of paperwork you have to deal with. It's not long before the tests take more time and energy than they are worth. Fourth, decisions on admission, promotion and graduation are often made with tests that aren't designed with such high-stakes applications in mind. To make such decisions, extra time, cost and effort must go into designing and validating the test. These resources are beyond what teachers - and even school districts - can do, but some state standards tests don't make the investment either.

 

Making Tests Useful

So, how d'es Plato make tests useful? Here are five suggestions:

1. Pretest for readiness and need, then individualize based on the results. A generation ago, Benjamin Bloom showed that half of the "bell-shaped curve" of achievement was due to differences in readiness of learners. No learner should be required to study something they are not ready for, or to study something they have already mastered.

2. Make tests competency based. Norm-referenced tests place learners on the curve, but they don't show what learners have mastered and need to study. Only competency-based tests can generate information that is useful to teachers as they work with individual learners.

3. Keep tests aligned. It's a lot of work to make sure that tests really do test what the curriculum calls for. Without detailed alignment to the curriculum, it's impossible to use a test for personal prescriptions. A badly aligned test places learners and teachers in a catch-22 situation - they have to choose between the curriculum and the test.

4. Automate tests. This provides real-time information for teachers to use in guiding their teaching, while saving valuable classroom and preparation time.

5. Don't use low-stakes tests for high-stakes decisions. Let's use the high-cost validated tests for the high-stakes decisions such as certification. For the other types of tests, we can afford to use low-stakes tests.

 

The PLATO system combines automated testing with automated prescription and instruction - both online and off - in a flexible, well-aligned system that allows teachers to make fine-grained decisions about their learners. The system includes pretests, progress tests, summative tests and practice tests that simulate the state standards certification tests. Because the whole system is online, teachers get real-time information that d'esn't require laborious manual marking. And because the tests are carefully aligned to standards and carefully constructed, the information they produce is valid and detailed enough to be useful to teachers; though not for high-stakes purposes. Powerful improvements in instructional efficiency and effectiveness can result.

 

By Rob Foshay, Ph.D.
Vice President of Instructional Design and Cognitive Learning, PLATO Learning

Contact Information
PLATO Learning Inc.
Minneapolis, MN
(800) 44-PLATO
www.plato.com