Short, low-stakes tests also help teachers gauge how well students understand the material and what they need to reteach. Summative tests, such as a final exam that measures how much was learned but offers no opportunities for a student to improve, have been found to be less effective. Teachers should tread carefully with test design, however, as not all tests help students retain information.
Though multiple choice tests are relatively easy to create, they can contain misleading answer choices—that are either ambiguous or vague—or offer the infamous all-, some-, or none-of-the-above choices, which tend to encourage guessing. While educators often rely on open-ended questions, such short-answer questions, because they seem to offer a genuine window into student thinking, research shows that there is no difference between multiple choice and constructed response questions in terms of demonstrating what students have learned.
All students do not do equally well on multiple choice tests, however. Researchers hypothesize that one explanation for the gender difference on high-stakes tests is risk aversion, meaning girls tend to guess less. It reported that the metacognitive skills of students in classes that used exam wrappers increased more across the semester than those of students in courses that did not employ exam wrappers. In addition, an end-of-semester survey found that among students who were given exam wrappers, more than half cited specific changes they had made in their approach to learning and studying as a result of filling out the wrapper.
The practice of using exam wrappers is beginning to spread to other universities and to K—12 schools. When she hands back graded tests, the exam wrapper includes such questions as:.
Based on your responses to the questions above, name at least three things you will do differently in preparing for the next test. Research on retrieval practice shows that testing can identify specific gaps in students' knowledge, as well as puncture the general overconfidence to which students are susceptible—but only if prompt feedback is provided as a corrective.
Over time, repeated exposure to this testing-feedback loop can motivate students to develop the ability to monitor their own mental processes. Affluent students who receive a top-notch education may acquire this skill as a matter of course, but this capacity is often lacking among low-income students who attend struggling schools—holding out the hopeful possibility that retrieval practice could actually begin to close achievement gaps between the advantaged and the underprivileged. This is just what James Pennebaker and Samuel Gosling, professors at the University of Texas at Austin, found when they instituted daily quizzes in the large psychology course they teach together.
The quizzes were given online, using software that informed students whether they had responded correctly to a question immediately after they submitted an answer. The grades earned by the students in the course featuring daily quizzes were, on average, about half a letter grade higher than those earned by a comparison group of of Pennebaker and Gosling's previous students, who had experienced a more traditionally designed course covering the same material.
Astonishingly, students who took the daily quizzes in their psychology class also performed better in their other courses, during the semester they were enrolled in Pennebaker and Gosling's class and in the semesters that followed—suggesting that the frequent tests accompanied by feedback worked to improve their general skills of self-regulation.
Most exciting to the professors, the daily quizzes led to a 50 percent reduction in the achievement gap, as measured by grades, among students of different social classes.
Gosling and Pennebaker, who along with U. And therein lies a dilemma for American public school students, who take an average of 10 standardized tests a year in grades three through eight, according to a recent study conducted by the Center for American Progress. Unlike the instructor-written tests given by the teachers and professors profiled here, standardized tests are usually sold to schools by commercial publishing companies.
Scores on these tests often arrive weeks or even months after the test is taken. And to maintain the security of test items—and to use the items again on future tests—testing firms do not offer item-by-item feedback, only a rather uninformative numerical score. There is yet another feature of standardized state tests that prevents them from being used more effectively as occasions for learning.
The questions they ask are overwhelmingly of a superficial nature—which leads, almost inevitably, to superficial learning. If the state tests currently in use in U. In a report published in Yuan and Le evaluated the mathematics and English language arts tests offered by 17 states, rating each question on the tests on the cognitive challenge it poses to the test taker.
The authors used level DOK4 as their benchmark for questions that measure deeper learning, and by this standard the tests are failing utterly. Only 1 to 6 percent of students were assessed on deeper learning in reading through state tests, Yuan and Le report; 2 to 3 percent were assessed on deeper learning in writing; and 0 percent were assessed on deeper learning in mathematics. According to Darling-Hammond, the provisions of No Child Left Behind effectively forced states to employ inexpensive, multiple-choice tests that could be scored by machine—and it is all but impossible, she contends, for such tests to measure deep learning.
But other kinds of tests could do so. Darling-Hammond wrote, with her Stanford colleague Frank Adamson, the book Beyond the Bubble Test , which describes a very different vision of assessment: tests that pose open-ended questions the answers to which are evaluated by teachers, not machines ; that call on students to develop and defend an argument; and that ask test takers to conduct a scientific experiment or construct a research report.
In the s Darling-Hammond points out, some American states had begun to administer such tests; that effort ended with the passage of No Child Left Behind. She acknowledges that the movement toward more sophisticated tests also stalled because of concerns about logistics and cost. Still, assessing students in this way is not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy: Other nations, such as England and Australia, are doing so already.
She does see some cause for optimism: A new generation of tests are being developed in the U. Herman notes that both tests intend to emphasize questions at and above level 2 on Webb's Depth of Knowledge, with at least a third of a student's total possible score coming from questions at DOK3 and DOK4. For example, an excellent writer could struggle with picking out the right answer in a multiple choice grammar and punctuation test. Yet that same student could excel at composing well-thought out, logical essays about the literature they read and enjoyed in class.
In fact, researchers have found that high standardized scores have little correlation with memory, attention and processing speed. High test scores could simply mean a student excels at rote memorization and multiple choice test taking.
Standardized testing is truthfully a very difficult issue, because we do need internal and external assessments to measure student success.
Topics Curriculum , Student Assessment. Why Whitby? Share this Post. The Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing. One of the criticisms of multiple-choice tests is that they expose test takers to the correct answer among the available options. Psychological scientist Jeri Little and her colleagues investigated whether multiple-choice tests could actually be designed to call upon these retrieval processes.
If the alternative answers are all plausible enough, they hypothesized, test takers would have to retrieve information about why correct alternatives are correct and also about why incorrect alternatives are incorrect in order to be able to distinguish between the two. In two experiments, the researchers found that properly constructed multiple-choice tests can, in fact, trigger productive retrieval processes.
They also found that multiple-choice tests had one potentially important advantage over tests in which only the question is presented.
Both kinds of tests helped test takers remember the information they been tested on, but only the multiple-choice tests helped them recall information related to incorrect alternatives. These findings suggest that multiple-choice tests can be constructed in ways that exercise the very retrieval processes they have been accused of bypassing. Corresponding author: Jeri L. Little — Washington University in St. Louis — jerilittle gmail.
Testing Enhances the Transfer of Learning. Many studies have shown that having to retrieve information during a test helps you remember that information later on. Much less is known about the whether testing might also promote the application — or transfer — of learning.
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