Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Opponents
of large-scale assessments say that they prompt teachers to teach to the test.
As I have said in an earlier blog, if the assessments measure performances on
things that are important to be able to do or know, teaching to the test is not
a bad thing.
But all
teachers “teach to the test.” What I mean by that is all instruction begins
with establishing a clear objective or destination. Although they may not
(should not) wait for external assessments to determine whether the students
have achieved the objective or reached the destination, teachers use classroom
assessments that they have devised to monitor student progress along the way
and, often, at the end of a unit.
Sometimes
called backward design or backward planning, the process starts with the end
point of the unit or lesson and works backward toward the beginning. Once the
goals (and big ideas) are established, teachers develop the instructional
sequence that they think will help the students reach the goals, including the
‘way points’ or indicators of progress that teachers assess along the path.
The
assessments may entail simple observation on the part of the teacher, the
completion of a task or problem the teacher has set, a quiz, a demonstration, a
dramatization, a graphic representation, essays, presentations, project work, portfolios,
etc. All teacher assessments are high stakes in the sense that cumulatively
they will figure in a teacher’s overall appraisal of a student’s performance.
Teacher-made
assessments are very “costly.” They are more costly than large scale
assessments when you add up the amount of time teachers spend creating and
marking the various assessments that they use.
With both teacher
assessments and large-scale assessments, validity is a big deal. Are the
judgments or decisions made based on the assessment(s) justified by the data
generated by them? For instance, I do not eat at [restaurant name] because the
first time I ate there I had food poisoning. The tenuous connection between my
decision and the data is insufficient to justify my conclusion. Can a
recommendation for a gifted program be made because the student produced an
imaginative science-fair project? Does a two-minute audition justify a
director’s decision to offer or deny a leading role in a school play?
Reliability
is another important consideration in assessment. Does the assessment
accurately measure whatever it is trying to measure? As I have mentioned in an
earlier blog, when I was a child our furnace was fueled with oil from a large
tank in our basement. Each fall my father would climb a step ladder and put a
stick into the tank to determine how much oil we needed. This was important
because the truck that delivered the oil served many customers. The driver, to
ensure that there was sufficient oil in the truck, would ask in advance, “how
much do you need?” My father would tell him. But my father’s measurement of the
oil in the tank was very inconsistent. Sometimes he would insert the stick in
the tank on an angle. In the low light in the basement, he would sometimes
misread the level on the stick. His appraisal of the volume of oil we needed
was often mistaken because of the measurement errors he made. The driver would
be annoyed when my father’s assessment was too low, and the driver would have
to return to finish filling the tank.
Individual
teacher assessments are often unreliable. Fatigue, the pressure of time,
ambiguous instructions, and many other factors detract from the reliability of
teacher assessments. It is fortunate, however, that teachers make (or should
make) many individual assessments before arriving at a judgement about
performance (assigning a grade for the year, for example). Although notoriously
imprecise, the use of multiple assessments throughout the year is assumed to
average out the measurement error.
Interpretation
(by parents and other teachers, for example) of the judgements that teachers
make about student performance in an area of study is very challenging because
teachers vary in what they consider in making an assessment. For some, the
assessment reflects work habits, punctuality, task persistence, engagement,
etc. There is little consistency across teachers and, often, little consistency
from one assessment to another for the same teacher.
Lack of
consistency about the features that a teacher is taking into account and
inconsistency across teachers compromise the validity of the judgements and
decisions made on the basis of assessments. These undisclosed aspects of a teacher’s
assessment might be one reason why some teachers complain about “teaching to
the test.” The “test” is only one of several things that a teacher uses to gauge
student achievement.
That all
teachers “teach to the test” is definitely not an indictment of what they do.
Teaching to the test is a crucial element of all instruction and should be
celebrated.