Why Testing and Grading Are Important
In today’s school environment, the concept of testing and grading have gone by the wayside. No longer are students provided with concrete numbers that represent how much of the curriculum they have learned. They do not have to prove that they have learned anything. Instead, they are given opportunities to show their learning by producing projects and crafts that reflect their learning, but these do not prove their learning. The parents are shown pictures online of what the students have created and then they are told what the child has been working on. If the student is struggling with concepts in Math or reading, it generally only shows up when the child struggles in the succeeding grade. Many parents are wise enough to see when the child is having problems, but since the curriculum goals are fairly fluid, the parent cannot really know if there is a real problem. Without real testing, there is no objective way to tell if a child is not learning what they should know at that grade level.
According to the “experts”, generally those with PhDs whose book knowledge exceeds their experience, children are not interested in how well they are doing compared to any standard. Children are told repeatedly that when they show up for something, that is good enough. They are patted on the back and told how good they are. The focus these days is on students’ self-esteem and their feelings, rather than their abilities. What this concept fails to account for is that people judge themselves by comparing themselves either to others or to the expectations of their parents and those around them. This is natural human behaviour. When experts try to ignore or subvert this fact, they try to make students believe that everyone is the same and there are no real differences in ability and no benchmarks for success. This is blatantly false, and people innately know this.
Current grading practices are nebulous at best. In the early grades, students are provided with a “meeting expectations” or “exceeding expectations”, etc. However, if the “expectations” are vague and uncertain, and parents don’t know what they are, then it is simply impossible to tell how well a student is doing or how well he is progressing. If you read the modern curricula published by the provinces, the information is so complex and wordy that finding a specific benchmark for expectations is almost impossible. Therefore, testing for these expectations is also virtually impossible. To really understand how curriculum is presented to teachers, see https://curriculum.learnalberta.ca/home/en. This is Alberta’s curriculum package, but it is similar to those published in other provinces.
I have been an educator since 1985, and a scholar before that, and I have noticed a distinct decline in the willingness of students to participate in events that have no criteria and no standards. When a student knows he or she will receive a prize equal to that of all the other students, there is no incentive to try harder than your neighbour. When a student knows he or she will pass onto the next grade whether they do any work to earn it, that student finds no motivation to do the hard tasks. This has been extremely detrimental to students’ ability to feel proud of any accomplishment, and detrimental to their willingness to do anything that requires effort with no real recognition and reward.
To try to find some measure and a standard of success, people have turned to sports. At least in sports, the concepts of “winners” and “losers” still provides a way to measure oneself against a tangible set of criteria. Winners can congratulate losers on a game well-played, but that does not challenge their pride in winning. And losing provides the loser a distinct way to assess how they can improve. That is what post-game analysis is for. In the same way, when a student receives a 75% grade on a test, that student is happy that they know that much of the material and they can see what they still need to learn.
When I was young, I waited eagerly to find out my grade and to see if I really knew what I thought I knew and to see if I got something wrong so I could be corrected. While some of my classmates groaned or were jealous of those who scored higher, I knew instinctively that this exercise was important for all of us. When I became a teacher, therefore, I was always sure to help my students understand their grades. Many would come to me to ask how they could improve. Of course, I always try to help students succeed and I would find a way. Unfortunately, some did not seem to care. They were happy if they passed even by the minimum. But I could not ever lower my standards to make tests or grading easier for those who did not want to work to get high grades. Good grades should be earned, not granted like pardons for past failures.
This last point needs to be explored further. When someone is granted a pardon or even parole for past crimes, people automatically judge the wisdom of that decision. If the crime was serious, such as murder, we wonder if that was a wise choice. Will that person murder again? In Canada right now, many people have been murdered in the past year by people who were out on bail or out on parole. We know the dire consequences of these very bad decisions not to lock up people who commit serious crimes. The criminals who are let go will do crime again. They have not learned that leniency means grace. They have learned that leniency allows them to get away with serious crimes. Basic human nature tells us that people are motivated to reach for a goal, and if there is no goal in sight, they will lose incentive.
However, in the realm of education, the ramifications of granting pardons to those who have not measured up to a solid standard of excellence show up much later. A student who could not read in Grade 2, but was passed though to each successive grade, is now unable to read in Grade 8. High school looms before him like a sentence of torture. I have met these students. They think they are stupid. Their self-esteem has been damaged almost beyond repair. They do not know how to recover, and when I tried to help them recover, they resist, believing they are too stupid and it is too hard. I reassure them that it is not their fault and that teachers should have made sure they had learned what they needed to do well in school, but it is difficult to get them to believe it. So much for the concept of building self-esteem by allowing them to keep going in spite of failure to learn.
I will not reiterate here how the concept of self-esteem has damaged many people’s education. Please see my other blog posts about this. However, I will further this topic by describing how teachers can hold students to high standards while preserving their self-esteem.
- Have specific standards.
Standards must be clear and easy to understand. For example, math questions, when written into a notebook, must be accompanied by the calculations. “Show your work” is the sentence teachers use to try to get students to do that. What should teachers do when that criterion is not met? To properly train a student, the teacher must make him redo the calculations in the notebook. Of course, just telling students to show their work is not good enough. One must demonstrate, participate, and then make the student do the calculations properly.
Standards are the road map to success. They provide a positive way of showing students what needs to be done and what needs to be learned. Students are on a journey to knowledge. If they don’t know the way, if they can’t find the road, they will be lost and unmotivated. High, clear standards provide the map to success at school.
- Teach students that mistakes are made so we can learn.
Teach students to use pencils and erasers and to correct their answers. When someone thinks that mistakes are bad, they cannot learn to learn. Wrong answers need to be made right. Wrong thinking needs to be challenged and corrected. Never scold a child for making a mistake. Treat it as an opportunity to learn. Make it a habit to get students to think about how they came to a wrong conclusion so they can see how their thinking works. It reveals blind spots and biases. I remember a specific test I had in Grade 5. The test question was “What is a hill?” I pondered for some time, and I simply could not think why a teacher would ask such a simple question, so I put nothing. When the answer was revealed, I realized I had overthought the question and knew the answer all along. It was simply a rise in the ground. I was learning how to learn.
- Always go over answers with students so they learn how to correct their thinking.
It is paramount to make sure students learn the correct answers and how to correct themselves. Everyone needs to think of mistakes as opportunities, as noted above. Getting an opportunity to know what the correct answer is provides that learning moment so vital to retaining information. After all, information is still the basis for knowledge. If you have no solid grasp of knowledge, your brain cannot go to the next step of assessing and processing that information. So many these days think that it is not necessary to know any facts because they can look facts up on the internet. But that is blatantly false. Websites like Wikipedia are regularly filled with information that is false, made up by someone with an agenda to push. Facts are still facts and should be verifiable. Think of it this way: What if your doctor had to constantly look up what the function of a kidney was in order to diagnose a disease? What if his knowledge of bodily functions was vague and uncertain? If he did not pass that biology exam with flying colours, I do not want him as a doctor.
- Teach students how to fail forward.
When students fail, it is important to teach them how success is a result of failures. While I always have a policy that students can challenge what I think, I always retain the right to tell them what the right answer is after I have taught the class. Even if they don’t agree with me, they have to accept the consequences of their decision to disagree with me, the teacher.
First, it is important for students to know that life is not fair. People will not always do what they want them to do just because they insist that they are right. They will grow up to understand that there really is a hierarchy of people in every organization and every situation. There are always those in charge and those who are supposed to follow instructions. So, learning how to do well in a situation where you are being judged by your actions, not your intentions, is a vital task. This is actually what it means to fail forward. If you have failed at something, it is your job to take responsibility for it and to decide how to move on without resentment and anger at someone else for your failure. If you did something that contradicts what the person in charge says, you have taken on the responsibility of standing with your decision in spite of the consequences. This avoids a victim mentality. It teaches that each person is responsible for his actions and not responsible for others’ actions.
Taking tests and exams is a time-tested way of proving one’s learning. If tests make a student nervous, it is the job of the student to learn how to do tests to the best of their ability. Avoiding the test is learning that responsibilities can be avoided. Let’s teach students to move forward through failures and tough problems rather than bypassing them.