Six Hats of Traditional Testing

White:

• Test of learning
• Objective is to check how much the students learned
• Students prepare, answer the questions, get the grade, and move up

Yellow:

• Opportunities for the students to review lessons, and study missed lessons
• score and grades help them move up
• higher scores help them to go to higher studies

Black:

• memorize, vomit, and forget cycle; does not promote learning
• grades do not reflect learning; it could be more of even less than what the students knows
• Takes too much time
• the grades are distraction to learning
• students learn for the sake of learning;
• not learning for the joy of learning
• what do we do with the grades next

Red:

• we waste 8 out of 32 classes for testing; 25% of the limited class time is used for testing.
• puts too much pressure on the learners
• some  kids cannot do the test well under pressure
• when it comes to language acquisition everyone acquires different things. the test can only test a subset which at times could be completely different from what one student learned.
• instead of asking them what they know, we ask if they know certain things.
• does not promote deeper learning

Green:

• use formative assessment
• test for learning
• test while learning

Blue:

• Drop traditional testing
• Use formative assessment
• Use Prove Learning strategy

Testing

I have some opinion about Testing. This comes from my own experience from school, and teaching and testing students in CTA, reading about testing, and also learning alternative approaches to testing.

The objective of this exercise is to take a closer look at testing and come out with an unbiased information, and take educated decision.

Let me analyze this using Six Thinking Hats.

White: the facts

Given to students to know how much they learned about the materials.

Students prepare for the test before the test, and take the test on the test day.

The teachers correct the papers and give marks, letter grade, or both.

Yellow: the advantages

It gives students the opportunity to review / study the materials.

It gives the teachers opportunity to give feedback to the students and hence the parents.

The feedback gives students the opportunity to learn what they missed.

Black: the disadvantages

It is stressful.

It is about pushing forgettable facts into the short term memory, vomiting in the test, and forgetting right after the test. Meaning, most students do not know most of what studied for the test after few weeks. Hence the long term learning because of testing is small.

Though the test gives the students opportunity to learn what they missed, most students do not because they get busy with getting good marks in the next test.

Teachers do not use test scores to help the students learn what they missed. We just move on with next lesson.

Red: Emotions

Puts too much pressure on the students and parents.

Marks do not reflect actual learning.

Does not help with long term learning.

The amount of time and resource used for testing can be used for active learning.

Green: Alternatives

Consider formative assessment.

Consider a mix of formative and summative assessments.

Consider "demonstrate your learnig" approach to assess and give mark and grades.

Consider giving marks based on their completed projects, active participation in the class, and demonstration of acquired skill/knowledge.

Blue: Recommendation

This does not change my opinion about testing. We need to seriously look at how we test, and make it effective for our students.