Testing Matters

The debate rages on about the efficacy of testing! My daughter Jill, who is studying for elementary education, asked me the other day if I am with all those who are screaming about too much testing—“all the kids do is test.” I thought for a moment before answering that when testing is used to differentiate for learning needs, adjust instruction, and inform interventions, it is a most valuable tool. Jill agrees because her children have attended school here at Copper Hills, and she has seen how great teachers use assessment to give HER children the best possible in elementary education. I have thought about her question (and comments from Facebook about a post I did about Common Core) for days now and even discussed it with some of you. IS all this testing necessary? Important? Useful? Instructive? Informative? Enabling? Have I gone to the “dark side” because I support the constant checks for understanding, DIBELS progress monitoring, Acuity screeners and benchmarks, CFAs, unit tests, writing assessment programs, IXL and Moby Max, the 36s testing, oral quizzing, data collection, and transparency in scoring? I would like to make a case for all this testing! • John Haddie’s Visible Learning (2008) meta study suggests that the highest correlation among all educational strategies lies in student accountability for their own learning—scores. skills, grades, etc. I see that when students own their own data (through assessment) and set their own goals, they also are motivated to learn. If our focus is on student learning, what more could we ask? I interviewed about 90 students last week who proudly displayed their data books and informed me of their increases. They owned their achievement, and they were proud and motivated by that! It works better than ANY OTHER learning strategy! • Teachers at Copper Hills who are devoted to student achievement reward increase and meeting goals. This reward (praise, tangible rewards, recognition) motivates and encourages students to do better! An old Yiddish saying says, “BETTER has no end.” Indeed, we are always trying to find a better way. • All that testing and data proves that we educators are doing our job. This is an argument that the District gives for testing, and it is true. I once heard a superintendent from back East say that he could tell the students were learning by “looking in their eyes.” That just is not true! He is living in make-believe land. We know that students have learned the skills we are teaching when they can produce, explain, or in another way show their learning. • Reviewing data helps us become better teachers. When I was an intern administrator, I interviewed an excellent teacher who told me that she actually appreciated NCLB because it made her a better teacher. What!?! I had never heard of such a thing—an educator in favor of all that testing involved in No Child Left Behind? The teacher moved at the end of that year to another school district, but I learned a lesson from her: teachers who USE the data from testing to become better educators have found a formula that works. We are all about STUDENT LEARNING. Students are excited and happy when they are learning. • Those small, formative tests (even checks for understanding within each lesson) allow teachers to reteach, review, enrich, and differentiate for each student. A CFA is a common formative assessment used by teachers on a team, teaching the same lesson, to find which students have mastered the lesson. It can be an exit ticket of a couple of questions or a 10-question quiz to inform the teacher of student learning needs. Masterful teachers use CFAs to find students who need more help or are ready for enrichment. When I started teaching 30 years ago, testing was not such a big deal. As a teacher, though, I felt the need to assess my students’ learning at every turn so that I could differentiate and intervene appropriately. I was always quizzing during lessons and listening. Without doing that I felt that my “teaching” was in vain. Delivering information or presenting material is not an educator’s job. Student learning is what we are after! It takes more than looking a student’s eyes to see if we have done the job we are hired to do. Assessing is essential. It is constant. It is informative. It is rewarding--when used to ensure student success in the learning community. Have a really GREAT week! Keep doing hard things!