Have you ever taken a test that left you frustrated? Did you feel that it didn’t really measure how much you knew?

Last year, I returned to school after taking a couple semesters off.

Well, I took on quite the load tht first semester! –Five classes, most of them 3 credits each. It was really taxing, but thanks to a supportive husband, I was making it through.

But not everything was working out. My nerves were suffering under the duress. On top of that, as I went to class, I continually felt punished for thinking critically about the class material.

One of my teacher frequently assigned textbook readings, and there were usually tests to go with them, which wasn’t too bad, except that the questions were all multiple choice, and some of them actually had more than one correct response according to the book.

But when I brought this up to my teacher, she defended the test. Period.

But my focus isn’t on the teacher for this scenario. It’s on the test. That test failed. It failed because it didn’t actually measure what I knew on the subject. It failed because it didn’t paint an accurate picture of me as a student in this teacher’s class.

I’ve recently been reading a book called An Introduction to Student Involved Assessment For Learning by Rick J. Stiggins and Jan Chappius, and as the title indicates, it’s all about assessment. In the first chapter, there is an analogy that I want to use and build on here, in light of my experience:

A GPS is a Global Positioning System. If it’s working, it can tell you where you are and how to get to where you want to go. If you get off track, the GPS finds the next best route to get you back on the right road, as soon as possible.

Teachers are the GPS of the classroom. They use assessments, both formal and informal, to tell where the students in their classes are. A teacher may have a couple of students over on Stark Ave, while other students are stuck on Wallace St., and still others are on Colbern Blvd, with only a few over-achievers actually on the highways! The students in one class could be all over the map! But while the initial understanding of each student is in a different location, the destination is the same for all of them: mastery of that year’s content.

As teachers, we may feel that we need to teach how to get to the destination using only the highways (the mainstream content we are required to teach) in order to accommodate so many different students. After all, the students will all eventually need to use the highway in order to get there, so why not just teach a blanket lesson for them all?

This happens a lot. Instead of differentiating the lesson for individual student needs, teachers may give lessons that meet the needs of “most” students. Thus, those that are already on the highways get to the destination faster, and the students who can’t find their way to the highway get even more lost.

Teachers should make sure, when they get assessment data, to analyze it and use it to provide adequate instruction for the students, so that they can bring their lost students up to the highways, ensuring that no one gets left behind.

But what if the tests themselves are faulty? Then, as the GPS, we are just about as lost as the students are. Broken assessments render us unable to give the specific directions to our students that they need. Indeed, without the proper tools to show us and them where they are, students may not reach the destination.

Which brings me to the next part of my post. I believe that, generally speaking, we put too much blind faith in the tests given at school. We assume that because “a big company wrote it,” the test must be trustworthy and will accurately assess our students. So we give the test, our students take it, we grade it, we report on it, and then we move on with our lives, assuming that we know where the students are.

If we have misjudged, we are in for a lot of heartache and trouble. Our students will fail to meet proficiency standards, lose their motivation to keep trying, and ultimately fall out of love with learning. To keep this from happening, we need to learn to personally critique assessments and figure out if they are 1) reliable, and 2) valid. Here are some definitions before we move on:

If a test is reliable, no matter who gives the test to the student, the result would be the same.

If a test is valid, that means that the results really tell you the truth about how well the student knows the content you are testing on.

To help illustrate these two ideas, I will share a metaphor that I’ve heard that describes reliability and validity this way:

Imagine that at home, you have a scale. You want to know how much you weigh, so everyday, at the same time of day, wearing the same weight of clothes, you step on the scale. It gives you your weight. And every day, that weight stays the same.

Sounds reliable! But then, you go to the doctor’s office and they take your weight. It turns out that you actually weigh 15 pounds more than you thought! What happened?

That scale at home seemed reliable, until you compared it with an accurate one (the one at the doctor’s office), and you realized that it wasn’t accurately measuring the weight it had promised to measure!

What’s even more, because it wasn’t measuring what it promised, it wasn’t giving you a true account of your results, and therefore wasn’t valid.

Too many tests wind up this way, especially if a teacher writes the test themselves without critically looking it over. When this happens, we aren’t able to really help the student, because the test may indicate that the student struggles with one concept, while there may be an even deeper concept that they lack.

That’s it! This has been a long post about some of my deepest feelings about assessments, particularly tests.

To recap, I just feel that tests given at school should do a few things:

1. A test should be reliable, so that the student would get the same score no matter what time of day it was taken, or who gave it.
2. A test should be valid, testing what it actually says it is testing.
3. A test should be accurate, giving the correct indication of the performance of each student.
4. A test should pinpoint where students are on the learning continuum.
5. A test should help a teacher decide what needs to be taught not only to the class, but also individually to the students.

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