Testing - Look what I found!

A teacher once said "the monthly tests take too much time."

A Conversation teacher asked "how can we test conversation and ensure each student gained the skill?"

These questions made me to look into testing of language classes. What do Ray and Krashen say? What does Douglas Brown say? What do successful schools and countries do?

After going over several testing methods, landed on the testing method used in Finland. Finland has the world's best education system ranking near the top consistently since 2000 in the international testing. So, they must have a good testing system, right? Let us see.

How do they test? Nothing. Meaning? Yes, they do nothing. That is, they do not give any tests until the student reach the age of 16. Starting kindergarten at 7, a student will be in 9th grade at 16. The tests are conducted when they reach 9th grade. What! So, how do they know the kids are learning then?

This means our Tamil schools that teach up to the age 13 usually and grade 7, does not have to conduct any tests at all then. Is that right?

Language experts say testing does not help a learner learn anything. Testing consumes too much time that can be used productively. The total time spent for preparing for the test, conducting the tests, correcting, grading, and maintaining the logs all can be used to help the students to acquire more language.

I am not saying testing is wrong, but, I believe tests are not worth the investment; the value add is very low.

If you google for US education vs Finland education you will find the following:

• US ranks around 20 while Finland ranks near the top.
• US spends huge amount of time and money for standardized testing while Finland does no such thing.

Ken Robinson goes to the extent of saying the US is trailing in education because of the testing craze!

Do we have any study that confirms testing adds value to the community language education other than using it for promotions and reporting to the parents?

There is another advantage in not having tests. The student drop outs will drop (out)!  

Testing is too narrow; what this means is that the focus is too narrow. It goes against how we acquire language; if we teach 100 words, the students will save 50 in memory, and only use 25 in output. Also which 25 will be used depends on the individual. So, if we give test that tests 25 words, no matter what strategy you use to pick, you are not going to come out with a test system that will test the skills of most of the students. Hence the testing goes against how the language is acquired. I would say the testing is a scam!

Testing wastes precious class time

A typical community language school runs once a week for about 1-2 hours a week. Assuming a test is given once a month, the test, and the preparation for the test, requires about 2 hours for each test. That is 2 hours out of 8 hours is used for testing. That is 25% of wasted time.

The testing puts unnecessary pressure on kids who have low motivation to learn their heritage language.

Refer to the chapter "Testing, Testing" in "Creative schools book by Ken Robinson.

Alternate approach

How do we know the learners are learning? This is a good and important question. One idea we can use is to give them a real life task or problem, and ask them to complete the task or solve the problem in the class. The task/problem has to be interesting and meaningful. The task can integrate the language skills we want the kids to acquire. From their completed work we will know how much they know. Using the end product we can asses who needs additional language training.

Conclusion

I do not see any good reason why we have to have tests in community schools. Tracking student progress, reporting to parents are low values at a very high cost of pressure on students, sacrificing real learning opportunity, and losing time on low value tasks.

Most importantly the test scores does not represent actual language skill. Most students spend 30 - 60 minutes before the test preparing, and score over 90% in the test. The typical problem here is that most of what is prepared for the test is forgotten few days after the tests are over; the test taker keep the materials in their short term memory and most are trashed away after the test. Real learning takes place when the language skill is pushed to the long term memory. In case of test preparation the push to long term memory does not take place.

Let us cancel all the formal tests. Conduct informal assessment in the class every day. Use it to plan for next class and report to the parents.

Thanks
Logu