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I definitly agree! Thank you Nellie for this interesting information! We have the same discussion over here! I cannot offer sources now, but I know that we have research in Germany that comes to the same conclusion. My personal experience is that bad marking is very harmfu. It´s not an information or a feedback like most of the teachers and authorities still affirm. Testing and marking works demotivating, if the student cannot gain good marks. (=> Authority points … That would be a great alternative!) It works well, if s/he gains good results. So for me the question is how to give them good marks, how to find out hidden ressources of the individual, that could be marked … Since we still have to mark!

Tatyana,

I believe teachers should do whatever it takes to make sure learners feel safe. I highly recommend Freedom to Learn by Rogers and Freiberg. The book explains how to make the learning environment inducive to learning.

Testing is only one form of assessment that teachers should be using in their classrooms. Other assessments can include conferencing, peer/self assessments, rubrics, final assessment tasks, portfolios, anecdotal observations, and so much more!

I become troubled more by testing when it is used at a regional level to determine things like teacher salaries and/or school funding. This is especially troubling when the testing is occurring with primary and junior aged students.

How can we say testing is harmful? Aren’t we in the business of testing? Yes, NCLB has forced states (and subsequently schools) to place too much emphasis on ‘high stakes’ summative tests. But might that not just be a result of too little emphasis on good continuous formative assessment to make sound data-driven instructional decisions? I think you might agree that across the board, a lot of the ‘testing’ that occurs in classrooms is just flat out bad – not linked back to clearly defined objectives, not scaffolded, not authentic, not meaningful in any way other than to prove that you made it through another chapter.

We aren’t doing our job if we aren’t assessing (testing??) students. And that assessment process makes up at least half of the art of teaching in my opinion. The problem is that we haven’t been doing a good job of it for a very long time. I don’t think the problem is the actual process of testing, its the types of testing that we are doing. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest we need more testing (YIKES!). We need good and meaningful ongoing formative assessments that are used to drive instruction and we need good summative assessments that are used to drive curriculum. Its easy to get people on board with that message. Unfortunately the entire discussion goes south when we start using state high stakes testing to punitively punish so-called underperforming schools instead of using the data in a meaningful way to measure growth.

I am an advocate of Value Added Assessment and think its the best way to use the ‘standardized’ testing data in such a way as it ‘makes it worthwhile’. Let’s start looking more at growth and less at performance. That makes it less personal and more meaningful. Its only when you start looking at growth in a way that is mathmatically accurate, relevant and meaningful that we can change our perception of testing from the horrible distraction that is to the essential tool that it can be.

As a student, am I allowed to say something here?

TESTS ARE GREAT!

You know what the real problem is? The school system in many countries forces people who don’t want to learn things into learning anyway. These students who don’t really want to learn make it appear as if testing hurts them, because there’s a correlation between bad marks and a lack of learning passion. But correlation does not equal causation, so we can’t know what led to what.

At the same time, people like me, who enjoy learning, like tests. They want to have an objective way of seeing their progress. Rubrics, self/peer evaluations, etc. are just not objective enough! Tests, especially standardized tests, are the best way of measuring the knowledge and comprehension of the student. Other forms of evaluation put too much emphasis on the variability of the instructor- essay rubrics or portfolio assessments often depend on whether the marker had a bad day or not. Well-written tests eliminate such problems.

I think that the most crucial step school systems in our days have to take is to take a step back. Stop forcing students into learning things they don’t care about- either raise some passion with good, interactive teachers and lessons, or else forget it, because right now we’re just hurting the students who actually want to learn.