Testing On Trial

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday June 21, 1990

Dr Geoff Masters

ON a Wednesday morning two weeks ago, 54,000 NSW children set off for school to take a test. They spent the morning reading about eagles, roller skates, lemonade and a baby galah. They also looked for mistakes in a story about a spotted creature. They coloured in pictures of coins and iceblocks, and they worked out the distance from Ghost Town to a bridge on a treasure map.

The test they were taking was the second of the Basic Skills Tests designed by the Australian Council for Educational Research for the NSW Departent of School Education.

Parents who saw the brightly-coloured magazines that children brought home must have wished, with me, that tests like these had been around when we were at school. The tests I took were dull. They were also pretty uninformative. But tests have changed.

There was a time when professionaly-developed tests and exams were used mainly to decide who would get scholarships and who would go to university. When you sat for those tests, you entered a competition. There were winners and losers. This is still the case, for example, with the Higher School Certificate.

With these type of tests there is also the risk that some of the winners may be those who are good at doing exams, rather than children and teenagers who are truly skilled at the subjects being tested. This is a problem which besets all testing which is used to competitively allocate scarce tertiary education places and there is no easy way around it.

Even leaving this issue aside, if competitions are to be fair, results have to be dependable. That introduces another problem: not everything that teachers set out to teach can be easily tested. Knowledge and arithmetic skills are relatively easy to test. But how dependably can we test creativity, problem solving or critical thinking? And if we test only what is easy, do we run the risk of sending wrong messages to students about what is important?

Not surprisingly, teachers have never been too thrilled about having their classrooms turned into a race. Nor have they been too thrilled about having tests send messages to their students. By the 1970s, many teachers had had enough of externally-developed tests. They formed an anti-testing movement to do away with them altogether.

But by the mid-1980s, some teachers were beginning to wonder whether this had been an over-reaction. Public criticism of schools was on the increase. Claims were being made that standards had fallen. There was no hard evidence to support these claims, but there was no hard evidence to refute them either. Growing numbers of students were competing for places in universities. And schools were being called on to be more accountable to parents and local communities. It was clear that the need for reliable information about what students are achieving was not about to go away and so shouldn't be ignored -whatever the difficulty of devising useful assessment methods.

Educators saw that abolishing tests was not the answer. Tests themselves had to be changed. If skills like higher-order thinking and problem solving were to be valued in schools, then ways had to be found of testing and rewarding those skills.

Around the world, the search was on for new and better kinds of tests. Because some skills could not be tested with pen and paper, these new tests would have to include practical tasks like measuring the temperature of a room, finding a way to check whether a battery was dead, and making presentations to the class. These new tests were given new names like "common"and "standard" assessment tasks.

Something also had to be done about the way test results were reported. Scores are good enough for competitions, but teachers and parents want tests to tell them how students are going. What are they good at? What sorts of things do they understand? What are their weaknesses? What can be done to help? Ideally, test results should be accompanied by some words that describe how students have performed.

That brings us back to the Basic Skills Tests that NSW Year 6 students took earlier this month. These tests certainly look more attractive than the tests we took at school. But the differences go deeper than that. The Basic Skills Test reflects what is happening in the world of educational tests. For a start, these tests are not like the "basic skills" tests that were popular in the US in the 1970s.

Those tests assessed only low-level survival skills like being able to read a bus timetable and the instructions on a medicine bottle. The NSW Basic Skills Tests goes much further. They assess a wide range of skills and include tasks that even more advanced children find challenging.

Questions for the Basic Skills Tests are written to reflect and support NSW syllabus statements. In maths, for example, the tests assess the three aspects of mathematics that all teachers cover in their classes. This reduces the chances of the tests sending wrong messages about what is important. Some tasks - like finding mistakes in other children's writing - are included because they match what children do in school. The Basic Skills Tests are not a competition. A student's results go only to his or her teacher and parents. This is because teachers and parents are in the best position to use the results.

A summary of each school's results is sent to the principal - the person best placed to interpret those results in terms of the language and cultural backgrounds of the school community. Contrast this with what happens in the UK where schools' results are published in newspapers for all to compare.

The NSW Basic Skills Tests do not identify some students as "passing" and others as "failing". The report to parents does not show how many students performed better or worse. Instead, it describes in words the kinds of skills the student has demonstrated in five different skill areas.

But that is only the beginning of the information that schools receive. Other reports allow teachers to spot where individuals had difficulty (or did unusually well) and allow each school to compare its results with the results of all other students in NSW.

This week, the Australian Council for Educational Research's report on the first round of Basic Skills Tests was released. It provides additional analysis of the results of those tests, the main outlines of which were made public late last year. Together with reports to parents, teachers and principals, the council report shows how the Basic Skills Tests are playing an important role in informing NSW education.