Tests in schools

Teacher’s professional role and responsibilities for student assessment:

Prof. Raja Gunawardhane

Several criticisms have been made regarding the school testing programs. Public attention has been drawn particularly to problems related to setting question papers, technical errors due to poor editing and printing, and poor test administration.

School testing program including term tests and year-end tests is only a part of the school assessment program. Assessment is an umbrella concept that encompasses different techniques, strategies, and uses.

In recent years, there has been a reaction to the heavy emphasis on written testing with a plea for more realistic performance assessment. Giving more responsibility to teachers, many school program have introduced classroom-based or school-based assessments. However, the term tests and year-end tests still dominate the school assessment program in Sri Lanka.

A test is a particular type of assessment that typically consists of a set of questions administered during a fixed period under reasonably comparable conditions for all students. Because a test is a form of assessment, tests also answer the question ‘how well does the individual perform - either in comparison with others or in comparison with a domain of performance tasks’. However, the main purpose of a school testing program is to improve student learning.

Performance

As a part of the assessment procedure term-tests should be conducted not only to compare one’s performance to that of other students but also to compare performance to a clearly specified achievement domain. For example, the result of the first term-test describes tasks students can perform. Students come to know their level of achievement and the teachers will understand their students’ performance levels so they can adjust their teaching for further development of students. In addition, tests provide a good source of information for a teacher’s self-evaluation of instructional effectiveness.

Teachers as educators must know the principles of school assessment and testing. A teacher may be having a specialized knowledge with regard to his/her subject, but that does not mean that he/she is a professional. The scope of a teacher’s professional role and responsibilities for student assessment covers many activities including competence in testing and assessment. Teachers who undergo formal teacher training courses in teacher training institutes and universities are well aware of these principles of testing but unfortunately, very few of them stick on to the knowledge and experience they had gained.

In developed countries, professional standards have been developed to provide a framework for what teachers need to know about classroom assessment. In 1990, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Council on Measurement and Education, and the National Education Association published a set of standards for teacher competence in conducting tests and assessment.

These standards include responsibilities of the teacher for involvement in school and district assessment and testing programs. The standards indicate specific assessment knowledge or skills that a teacher should posses to perform the roles and responsibilities for student assessment.

The standards suggests that teachers should demonstrate skills of selecting, developing, applying, using, communicating, and evaluating assessment information and practices. First, the teachers should be skilled in choosing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions considering background of students. Secondly, teachers should be skilled in developing tests and assessment methods. A test should be planned and the test papers should be constructed according to principles of testing.

Thirdly, the teacher should be skilled in administering, scoring, and interpreting the results of teacher-made and externally produced tests and assessments. Fourthly, the teachers should be skilled in using assessment results when making decisions about individual students, planning teaching, developing curriculum, and making recommendations for school improvement.

Grading

They should be skilled in developing valid pupil grading procedures that use pupil assessments. Another standard that the American National Council has recommended is the skill of communicating assessment results to students, parents, other lay audiences, and other educators. Lastly, the teachers should be skilled in recognizing unethical, illegal, and otherwise inappropriate assessment methods and uses of assessment information.

Keeping standards enhances the validity of a test. Validity is the most important quality to consider in the preparation and use of testing procedures. The test should be a representative measure of the achievement domain under consideration. For example if we infer from a test that students have achieved the intended learning outcomes, we would like some assurance that our tasks provided a relevant and representative measure of the outcomes. Through education, a student is expected gain different types of skills.

This includes memorizing and understanding data as well as higher order thinking skills such as comparison, analysis, reasoning, summarization, inference, evaluation, creation etc. If we expect to improve ‘reasoning ability’ as a learning outcome through teaching a subject the test paper should include questions that measure ‘reasoning ability’. If all questions in the test paper measure only knowledge and understanding skills it cannot be considered as a good test paper. In addition, a test paper should include questions to represent the content that taught during the term or the year.

Preparing an achievement test involves several steps. First, the teacher should identify and define the intended learning outcomes to be measured. The learning outcomes measured by a test should faithfully reflect the objectives of instruction.

Objectives

This requires the identification of those instructional objectives to be measured by the test and then clearly stating them in performance terms. Professional teachers know various guides that are helpful in preparing quality tests. These guides have been prepared by well-known educators and used all over the world. One useful guide is the cognitive domain of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which contains a range of types of learning outcomes to consider when planning a test.

Another modified version of the Bloom’s Taxonomy that teachers find easy to use is the Quellmalz Framework. For example, if the test paper contains many questions on recalling or paraphrasing of basic information the test cannot be considered as a good one because it does not address students’ higher mental abilities. Especially the test papers of secondary school students should be prepared in such a way that they should be able to measure students’ higher mental abilities.

The second step of constructing a test is the preparation of a set of test specifications. This is the real plan of the test that involves selecting the learning outcomes to be tested, outlining the subject matter, and making a two-way chart.

The purpose of this table is to provide assurance that the test will measure a representative sample of the learning outcomes and the subject matter to be measured. Professional teachers know how to prepare a two-way chart that describes the sample of items to be included in the test.

The teacher has to determine the number of test items (questions) to be included in the test and this should be indicated in the test specifications. The number depends on age of students, time available for testing, and the type of test items used. In the testing of primary school students, the testing time typically should be short so that proper motivation is maintained.

At the secondary school level, students can be given tests lasting several hours, but must be careful to select the type of test item suitable to the subject, learning outcome and the time. Experts say that as a rule of thumb secondary school students should be able to answer a MC type test item per minute when the items are measuring knowledge outcomes. For measuring more complex learning outcomes more time per item is needed.

Setting a test paper is a difficult task. Professionals know what type of test item is suitable for measuring a particular learning outcome. We know that that there are different question types (multiple-choice, true-false, matching, short answer, structured essay, extended response essay etc.) used in our school test papers. Teachers are familiar with these question types but the problem is to make suitable questions without mistakes. This needs a teacher professional training, experience and a sound knowledge of the subject.

The writer is a professor in education, former Dean of the Faculty of Education, University of Colombo. Email: [email protected]