Five reasons I don't give quizzes

Photo credit: QuotesBuddy.com

In my days as a traditional teacher, I loved the quiz. I informed students and parents that the quiz was a valuable tool, because it held students accountable. The "pop" quiz was an even greater weapon, as it kept students in a constant state of anxiety, always wondering when they'd be caught unprepared and their grade would be doomed.

When I converted my class to a Results Only Learning Environment, I eliminated all testing, including quizzes. Here are five reasons that quizzing doesn't work.

1. Most quizzes are made up of multiple choice items, which provide inaccurate results, because you never really know when a student guesses.
2. Many students simply don't test well, so they may know the material but get the quiz questions wrong.
3. There are many activities that engage students and are conducive to formative assessment, which is far less threatening than a quiz and provides much better feedback.
4. Quizzes create anxiety and tend to hurt students' grades.
5. Quizzes are designed to make students accountable for learning. Accountability makes students hate learning.

Do you know any reasons I left out?

A funny look at cheating in school

Love this video about how kids conspire to cheat. Anything to be learned here?

How to create good diagnostic instruments

I would love to see the words "test" and "quiz" eliminated from the education vernacular. In their traditional form, tests and quizzes do little more than punish students. These antiquated assessment devices are typically composed of multiple choice questions, which mirror content provided by the teacher, much of which requires only rote memory. If students don't remember the material or if they test poorly, they get a poor grade.

Photo credit: Alert-1.com

Students who test well and have good memories usually get high grades. Still, the teacher has learned very little about what a student has learned.

Tests that are prepared as tools for diagnosing learning are different from those used as carrots and sticks to punish or reward students. A well-written diagnostic includes a variety of questions about each learning outcome. These are straight-forward items, maybe multiple choice, that are never meant to trick students.

An effective diagnostic should avoid words and phrases like, "not," "except," "never" and "all of the above," or "none of the above." Good diagnostics do not focus on minute details that are not necessary to demonstrate mastery of a learning outcome. For example, distinguishing characters in a short story is not relevant to understanding how the setting affects the characters' actions. Similarly, asking students to name FDR's vice president has no bearing on the impact of his New Deal on the Great Depression.

Finally, an effective diagnostic instrument should never be graded. This is why students hate tests. If you avoid the word "test" entirely, you can explain to your students that, much  like a doctor, you are simply diagnosing the health of their learning.

If the diagnostic indicates problems, then revisit the lessons and models, in order to reinforce the objectives. Then, you can always re-administer the diagnostic, if you feel it's necessary.

Rethinking tests and quizzes

"Today, we'll have a pop quiz." Back in my days as a traditional teacher, I loved this sentence. There was a sense of power and control, when I surprised my students with some sort of test of knowledge over something we'd recently studied or of a chapter in some boring book I had demanded that they read.

By its most basic definition, the pop quiz is nothing more than a stick, used to punish students. It's not much better than the paddle, teachers used back in the days of corporal punishment. Students are asked to complete some basic task, and then they are tested on the knowledge they retained in a short period of time. If they have not completed the task, they fail the quiz.

Tests are not much different. Students study information the teacher provides, and they are given a list of questions created by the teacher, based on the information that was delivered. The teacher has all of the control -- one reason that tests masquerade as objective assessments, when they are, in fact, very subjective.

If we are to reform our failing education system, it's time to rethink tests and quizzes. To simplify things, the first step should be to eliminate quizzes entirely, as they serve no educational purpose. As Jerome Bruner wrote, teachers should help students "experience success and failure not as a reward and punishment, but as information (The Act of Discovery, 1961)."

So, let's concentrate on tests. Although project-based assessment is the best way to evaluate learning, tests can provide the information, of which Bruner writes.

The key to making good use of a test is to use it strictly as a diagnostic tool. In fact, the word "test" should be replaced with diagnostic. Students should be taught that a diagnostic tool, especially one that contains multiple choice items, is only part of assessment.

Because tests are unreliable and subjective, the results should never be part of a grade, and they should be used to evaluate which learning outcomes need more attention from the teacher. Rather than looking at test results in terms of individual students, they should be considered holistically. So, if 40 percent of a class misses number 8 on a diagnostic, there is either a problem with the item, or the learning outcome needs to be revisited.

When tests are used in this fashion, strictly as diagnostic tools, they become one useful part of evaluation of learning.

Look for more on this subject at this post on raising test scores.

Why high stakes testing is all about money

Today, I received correspondence in my school e-mail inbox from a company, promising to increase student achievement on our state-mandated standardized test.

For the small price of $1,495, Coach Publishing declares, I can plop my students on computers and have them take practice test after practice test. Oh, but there's more: for my slightly-less-than-$1,500 investment, the company will also give me real-time test results and customized skills practice.

Courtesy eHow.com

If one wonders why it's so difficult to get bureaucrats -- the same ones who blame teachers for the problems in education -- to understand what's wrong with high stakes testing, there is no better evidence than this. Politics is about lobbyists, and education has no bigger lobby than the opportunists who keep producing these useless test-taking programs at exorbitant prices.

Let's see, for $1,500, I could purchase 400-700 paperback novels. If I do nothing more than put the books in my students hands and tell them to read all year, they will still outperform their peers, who use software systems, like the one referenced above.

It doesn't matter, though, because high stakes testing is a big money business. So, while the testing lobby makes billions, our students suffer.

One problem with tests in school

When it comes to testing, there are far too many problems to list in one blog post.

I think this brief video certainly covers one of them

Educating parents on high stakes testing

One problem, among many, with government-mandated, high stakes tests is that many parents simply don't understand the deleterious effect these tests have on education. A thoughtful discussion about tests erupted at John Merrow's blog post about cheating.

One commenter, "Washington DC Parent," suggests that her child's teachers lend no credence to the test, explaining that it's not a good measure of her child's ability. She is convinced, however, that the tests did "accurately measure the struggles my child has been having and that have been dismissed by her teachers."

This got me to thinking that teachers need to do a better job education parents on just how bad standardized tests are. Perhaps responding to blog posts like Merrow's and posting to our own blogs is a good start. Here is my response to Washington DC Parent:

Dear Washington DC Parent, I’ve been teaching for 18 years. Let me tell you that the test is the worst way to measure achievement, regardless of what’s happened with your child. I don’t know your child’s teachers, but I do know that judging your child on how many times he/she recognizes that A, B, C or D is the correct answer to some convoluted question is a short-sighted way to evaluate academic progress.

With all due respect, there’s no kind of test, whether you administered it or a school did, that is accurate at measuring achievement. There are far too many variables involved in learning that are not considered in tests written by people outside of the arena where the learning takes place. Students demonstrate learning over long periods of time in many ways — not in one sitting, coloring in bubbles.

Some of my students score “advanced” on the Ohio Achievement Assessment. Many are no more advanced than students who score “proficient.” Some students test well, while others freeze, panic or get distracted during a 150-minute assessment that they may see as meaningless. I’ve known many excellent students who fail our high stakes test, only to confess the next school year that they simply didn’t try. “I don’t see the point,” a student once told me.

While I don’t know your child’s teachers, I can guarantee you that good ones can tell you how much your child has or has not learned without ever putting a multiple-choice or short-answer test in front of him/her. What’s needed is an entire school year filled with multi-faceted projects that are built throughout the year and constant two-way narrative feedback between the student and the teacher, which allows many opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of skills.

I also advised this parent to share results-only learning methods wither her child's teacher. If we get parents spreading the word about progressive methods, maybe together we can end the lunacy of high stakes testing.

Do your students ask to retake tests?

One of my favorite things about a Results Only Learning Environment is how it fans the intrinsic motivation that is inside of all students. Educators often smother intrinsic motivation by punishing students with grades and rules -- things that only make young people hate learning.

When students are given autonomy, they soon want mastery (this is human nature, after all). When we choose to do things because we're interested in them, it's only a matter of time before we want to be good at them.

Under the right conditions, students want to improve

One of my favorite examples is when my students ask me to retake tests. Recently we took a year-end reading diagnostic, which measures students' Lexile measures against a similar test they take at the beginning of the year. We read all year, so the students want to improve. I talk up the Lexile as a solid barometer of reading ability; plus, it helps students find books that they'll understand and enjoy.

When we take the final reading test, many students ask if they can take it over, if their Lexile measure decreases. I recently had a student send me a message on our classroom web site, asking to retake the test. She told me she just had a bad day. "I know I'm a better reader than that," she said of her low score. Of course, she could retake it, I responded. That's how we operate in a ROLE.

When my tests were only about final evaluation and scores for a report card, students almost never asked to take the test over again.