Transcript A Terse Self-Test about Testing

A Terse Self-Test about
Testing
From Popham (2005), Page 3
1.The chief reason that teachers should
give classroom tests is to determine
students’ grades:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
While the use of tests to determine grades is
an important use of tests it is not the only, or
even the most important use of tests.
Other important uses of tests are:
*Diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses,
*Monitoring students’ progress,
*Determining instructional effectiveness,
*Influence perceptions of educ’nl effectiveness,
*Evaluating teachers,
*Clarification of instructional intentions.
2. Teachers should typically plan
instruction that focuses on the skills or
knowledge represented by a test.
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
First consider the reason for giving a test in
the first place.
Why give a test that is NOT aimed at assessing
important instructional/learning targets?
If we know, beforehand, what we want students
to know and be able to do AND we are able to
determine what we would accept as evidence
that students have attained this knowledge
than why not aim instruction at that
knowledge?
A test is nothing more than a vehicle for
collecting the evidence we seek.
3. In their classroom tests, teachers
should only use items that can be scored
objectively:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
Objective tests (e.g., multiple-choice
tests, matching tests, true-false tests,
short-answer, and fill-in-the-blanks
tests) can be used, effectively, in a wide
variety of situations.
But there are many situations, like
assessing students’ ability to argue
persuasively, or their facility in speaking
a foreign language, that require teacher
judgement.
4. There are other legitimate indicators
of a teacher’s instructional
effectiveness besides students’ test
scores:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
The current trend, especially in light of
NCLB, is to evaluate teachers’
instructional effectiveness in terms of
students’ test scores.
However, several reasons can be given for
why this may be inappropriate (these
will be discussed later in this course).
Teachers can influence students,
positively, in many ways that are not
amenable to assessment via test scores.
5. A teacher has no business measuring
students’ confidence in their ability to
do school work:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
There are those who would argue that
assessing students’ confidence in their
ability is irrelevant or, at least,
unimportant.
On the other hand, there is ample
research that shows that students’
confidence in their own ability (often
called self-efficacy) is strongly related
to their performance.
6. Nationally standardize achievement
tests should never be used to supply
evidence about how well teachers are
instructing children:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
Nationally standardized tests are designed,
mainly, to assess student achievement
relative to national norming groups. They are
not particularly sensitive to individual
differences in instruction or to differences in
groups being instructed.
Mismatches can, and often do, occur between
what is tested and what is taught.
Important teacher-stressed content is often
excluded.
Attribution for good (or poor) performance on
these tests is often questionable.
7. Teachers really do not need to
determine the reliability of their own
classroom tests:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
It certainly is important for teachers to know
what reliability is, and to have a basic
understanding of how it is computed and
interpreted--especially since they are often
called upon to explain standard tests results.
However, other that the fact that it can impact
validity, reliability plays a relatively small role
in classroom tests (most have low reliability
anyway).
Teachers generally collect, and base
educationally-relevant judgments on, a large
assortment of assessment data.
8. It is impossible to judge the quality of
students’ written compositions with any
meaningful accuracy:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
Judging written work obviously involves teacher
judgment, which by its very nature is
subjective.
Often, attributes and characteristics of the
written work that are irrelevant to the
response requested influence the judgment.
However, with the careful use of well-designed
rubrics, much of the capriciousness involved
judging written work can be eliminated—or at
least curtailed.
Judges can be trained, easily, to evaluate
written work.
9. The enormous pressure to boost
students’ scores on important tests
permits teachers to employ almost any
sort of score-improvement preparation
alternatives:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
There are test-preparation procedures
and techniques that can be considered
educationally and ethically defensible
and there are techniques whose
educational and ethical defensibility is
questionable.
One question to ask: Is performance on
the test a consequence of learning or is
it a consequence of the test-prep
procedure?
10. Significant classroom tests should
almost always be constructed prior to a
teachers instructional planning:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Uncertain
Disagree
Strongly disagree
If important classroom tests are
designed to assess significant learning
outcomes (learning targets), then
designing such tests requires that the
teacher has clear understanding of what
is to be taught and, more importantly,
what the student should know and be
able to do. By deciding beforehand what
evidence of accomplishment is
acceptable the teacher is in a good
position to design the instruction.