How a test can be a villain for learning?
It is difficult to learn and grow in any environment especially in an online learning environment when you are constantly second-guessing yourself. This is what happens when we test the wrong things, create false conclusions, or don’t take enough time with our testing while teaching in a traditional setup or an online teaching environment. Are you aware of the fact that most students hate tests? The reason why they are so afraid is that they do not know how to deal with them. They are afraid of the outcome, they are afraid of failure and in some cases, they are also afraid of success due to the lack of confidence. That is why they are not always willing to put their best foot forward. They do not want to be judged, especially by someone who doesn’t know how smart they actually are.
Almost all educational tests are currently “static,” meaning they are designed to be administered only once to record a picture of a student’s current learning pedagogy knowledge and abilities. These static results are routinely used to make high-stakes judgments about a student’s future, such as identifying learning disabilities, academic placement, and even admissions to colleges or competitive online schools in India.
There are four major problems with static testing:
- It is not a good measure of growth, because it can only capture what students know and cannot provide any information about how much they have learned since the test was given.
- With high-stakes tests, there may be an incentive for teachers to give “good” scores in order to protect their students’ self-esteem.
- It is more difficult to interpret the scores, because some test takers may have gotten lucky or unlucky on certain items. This makes it harder for teachers and parents to know how much confidence they should place in a student’s test score.
- These tests are often narrow in scope, not covering an entire curriculum or subject matter, and thus failing to measure the full range of student learning pedagogyknowledge and abilities.
Testing should never define someone’s knowledge base, especially in an online learning environment. It does not show how much work they have put into something or how much they have grown. It is only a snapshot of what someone knows at that moment in time, and it can never be repeated again to show growth. If you are constantly testing the wrong things, there will always be false conclusions that may impede learning for everyone.
It should never define intelligence either because not all people learn the same way or at the same pace. If you are constantly testing what someone knows, rather than how much they know, your students will never truly learn because there is always a lingering fear of not being good enough check Blog on Education.
If we want to create life-long learners who love learning and growing as individuals, our tests need to change. Testing can be one’s villain for learning if you are constantly testing the wrong things. It is only one snapshot of someone’s knowledge at any given moment in time, and it should never define their intelligence or drive to learn more. The best way to test is by creating a dynamic assessment that measures growth rather than what someone knows at that point in time. This type of test can be repeated multiple times to show how much students have grown, or it could even measure the potential of a student. If you want someone to grow in any environment, may it be traditional or online teaching, testing will always become one’s villain for learning.
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