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