Test More, But Test Right

Teach­ers fre­quently com­plain about debate the need for the plethora of tests that we admin­is­ter on a reg­u­lar basis, and I have to admit I’m right in there with them. It seems like there is so much test­ing going on that we have lit­tle time left for instruction.

The real­ity of course is that there is plenty of instruc­tion going on, we just don’t have time to teach every­thing we would like or even are sup­posed to teach.

In this arti­cle, Scott McCleod pro­poses doing more test­ing, not less. I can almost hear you say­ing, “You have got to be kid­ding!” But hold on. He has a great point, and in fact if we do more of the right kind of test­ing, we can actu­ally save time and have more time for the qual­ity instruc­tion we want to do.

Pretest­ing like Scott is sug­gest­ing is some­thing that I heartily advo­cate. As a teacher of gifted stu­dents, I’m often called on to help class­room teach­ers fig­ure out how to meet the needs of stu­dents who have already mas­tered a large chunk of the mate­r­ial they are about to cover in class. Though some teach­ers are open and will­ing to learn how to com­pact the cur­ricu­lum by let­ting kids “test out” of some things they’ve already learned, many are reluc­tant. They are afraid they won’t have enough “scores” for the child to ade­quately cal­cu­late a report card grade, for exam­ple. They have a hard time jus­ti­fy­ing allow­ing a child to “skip” an assign­ment that oth­ers have to do because it’s “unfair.”

But as Scott points out, how fair is it to the child who has to sit through instruc­tion they don’t need? Con­sider tak­ing the time to pretest every unit you teach, and you will gain much:

• Pretest­ing can help you iden­tify con­tent that every­one in the class has mas­tered, which means you can skim over or skip it completely.
• You will also note the areas that are most broadly mis­un­der­stood so you can plan the most inten­sive instruc­tion around those top­ics and avoid skim­ming over things you “knew” they already had last year.
• You can iden­tify pat­terns in the errors that stu­dents make so you can select spe­cific exer­cises and instruc­tion that will cor­rect those misconceptions.
• You can use the data to group stu­dents accord­ing to need, design­ing small group instruc­tion or learn­ing cen­ter assign­ments that are tar­geted to sup­port­ing their par­tic­u­lar weaknesses.
• If you team teach or co-​​teach with some­one who isn’t in the class­room with you every day, pretest results can give that co-​​teacher a more com­plete pic­ture of your students
• If you are bas­ing instruc­tional deci­sions on pretest data, you have some­thing objec­tive you can point back to if you are chal­lenged by a par­ent or admin­is­tra­tor about why you are doing a par­tic­u­lar les­son, activ­ity or assignment.

What have been your expe­ri­ences with pretest­ing? When is it most use­ful? When do you find it not as helpful?

(A shorter ver­sion of this arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared in Grandé With Room.)