Calling Final Exams into Question

Oh. Snap.

A tweet from one of the people I've been following on Twitter since almost the beginning, Dan Meyer:

For real, tho: what are we gaining from final exams?

❌New insights into student learning.
✅Crazy amounts of student stress.

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) May 22, 2018

Calling the grand tradition of final exams into question seems...almost heretical.

But does he have a point?

I guess I'm now thinking about what the real point of final exams might actually be. Are they intended to provide new insights into student learning? Or are they a way to help students summarize and synthesize everything they had the opportunity to learn over the term? Or...maybe...they are a mechanism for compliance, a way to keep the kids (fearfully, stressfully) "engaged" (not sure that this is the right word for it...) until the end?

Is there value in in continuing the practice of final examinations?

Or is this an outdated vestige of educational practice from days of yore?

What do you think?

Image by Shannan Muskopf [CC BY-NC 2.0]

Learning to Teach Again: Testing Trials

I am a big believer in closely matching my assessment vehicles to what I want students to know, understand, and do. I think that they way we assess students matter, and I try to use a variety of different kinds of assessments to help me understand what my students understand. This means I use some very informal in-class assessments like quick-writes, Padlet boards to capture their questions, and even monitoring the conversations in small group discussions. But this also means I use a variety of formal, summative assessments that require students to synthesize their learning.

In other words, yes, I give tests.

Learning to Teach Again: Writing Tests

It's time for our first test of the semester in World Regional Geography. I've spent quite a bit of time over the past few days working on writing it. This perhaps something the non-teachers out there don't realize: writing a (good) test is actually a lot of work!

Yes, I know there are lots of pre-fab tests that come with curriculum materials. In my experience, these vary in quality quite a lot. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are pretty awful. Most are somewhere in between, perhaps with some great questions and some...less great questions.

I generally prefer to write my own tests though, and in this course in particular--while I do have a great text that we're using--I don't have a teacher's manual the way I did when I taught in K-12. And, honestly, I really prefer to write my own test questions anyway.

I've shared my strategies for writing test questions before on this blog, and I'm putting them into practice as I've been working on this test. It's been a timely reminder for me about the challenges of writing good questions: questions that get at what I most highly value, and not just what is easy to measure.

Image by Alberto G. [CC BY 2.0]
(Funny, because I never use Scantron sheets for tests I write...)

Opinions: Evidence of Thinking

"Hey, Professor Mulder...is this an opinion question?"

A few semesters ago, I had a student taking a test raise her hand to call me over with this concern. She was in the midst of of the test, doing her best to answer carefully, and the thought must have struck her that there were multiple "correct" answers to the question I was asking.

Not every question I ask on a test is cut-and-dried. Some are. Some questions are convergent: there is clearly one correct answer. Convergent questions are usually best for assessing relatively low-level knowledge and understanding. Can the students recall the facts? Have they mastered the vocabulary? Do they have an understanding of the basic concepts? Convergent questions are good for these sort of course material. By asking a convergent question on an exam, I am verifying that my students have mastered a particular concept. And this is valuable in it's way; there are concepts that I want all of my students to learn, and a convergent question is a way of focusing in on their knowledge of a particular concept.

However, I don't think that convergent questions are always the best questions, even on a test. I want my students to provide evidence of thinking, not just rote memorization. How will they use the basic concepts they have learned? I've written before about Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive objectives. Bloom's taxonomy is one way of thinking about different levels of thinking. Here it is in a nutshell:

Writing Good Test Questions

I have been thinking and writing a lot about assessment lately. My last post was basically a rant against unthinking assessment practices, and a challenge to all teachers (pointing the finger at myself here too) to be thoughtful in how they assess.

So how do we go about assessing thoughtfully?

In the curriculum and pedagogy courses I teach, we always spend some time talking about how to best assess students' learning. There are, of course, lots of ways to assess students, and the assessment vehicle you choose should match your goals of the assessment. Here are a few options we often discuss:

• Sometimes observation is all you need--especially while you are teaching. Reading students' body English and facial expressions, keeping aware of the the kinds of questions they are asking, and noting the kind of responses they are giving in response to your questions are all good ways to assess students' thinking while teaching is ongoing, and gives you the opportunity to change course if needed.
• Projects and performances are often valuable ways of having students apply their learning and demonstrate their proficiency at specific tasks or skills.
• Conferences, interviews, and small group meetings can allow the teacher the chance to talk with students in an individual or comfortable group setting. This takes some planning and management; what is the rest of the class doing while you meet with the individual or small group? But I've found that hearing students explain their understanding firsthand is often one of the best ways to know what they know!
• And, of course, tests and quizzes are still a key part of teachers' assessment strategies. In our current high-stakes, high-accountability school culture, outside testing pressures are often pretty significant. Some teachers argue that students need to take tests and quizzes just to practice, so they will feel comfortable and prepared for the high-stakes, state-mandated testing.

Image by COCOEN Daily Photos CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I always want to remind my students that tests and quizzes aren't the only way to assess, so I try to assign a variety of different kinds of assignments and projects to them in addition to tests and quizzes.

Improving Testing

My students in Introduction to Education had their first exam today. The class is mostly freshmen, and for many this was the first exam of their college career. Some came in very confident, others very nervous. One student admitted to me, "I just get so anxious every time I have to take a test!"

Image by wecometolearn [CC BY 2.0]

I thought that was an important comment--very honest! Many students are fearful of tests. Test anxiety is a real thing.

I'm thinking about how teachers write tests, and how we administer tests. I wonder if many students' anxieties about writing a test stem from previous bad experiences. And I wonder if there are ways we can improve testing.