Recovering from Overtesting
Making the Transition From Excessive Testing to Restorative Assessment
We stand at a crossroads of educational assessment. It is a time when opportunities are emerging to lessen the adverse effects of over-testing. This includes reducing the amount of time spent giving tests, time spent preparing for tests, and time generating vast amounts of unused data.
5 Steps to Recovery
- Decide what is really important for students to know and do. As Robert Marzano (2001) points out, if we want to teach all the standards we would need education from K-22. Start with a strong foundation of essential literacies and numeracy. Integrate those with the attributes that advance student success such as non-cognitive aptitudes, 21st century attributes, and abilities and for life.
- Remember that schools were designed to be places of learning, not test churning factories. Students need to be actively engaged in assessment and empowered as self-assessors who find delight, wonder, and gratification in learning.
- Consider the studies that find testing doesn’t raise achievement. Then, rely on the verifiable research (Stanford 2013, McMillan 2013) that clarifies the MUST’s of assessment: Mutual, Useful, Sticky, and Technically Sound.
- Emphasize growth rather than fixating on summative rankings. How wonderful it will be when students, teachers, parents, and communities celebrate improvement instead of final scores.
- Embed formative assessment throughout teaching and learning in order to take a continuous pulse of learning and inform in-the-moment responses and modifications.
All this is possible when we reduce the emphasis on testing while ramping up assessment that supports progress and success for all learners.