Constantly weighing the pig will not make it grow: do teachers teach assessment tests or the curriculum?
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Date
2014
Authors
Le Cordeur, Michael
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Education, University of the Free State
Abstract
For a number of years now, South Africa, like many other countries, has been debating
a major paradigm shift in education, a shift from learning and teaching, which focused
primarily on content to learning and teaching focused on outcomes. One of the most
dramatic trends in education over the last decade has been the shift towards the use
of assessment-based criteria, as opposed to assessment tests based on marks, scores
and data. However, as Jordaan (2010) quite rightly points out, assessment is an integral
part of teaching and learning, not just a means of monitoring or auditing learners’
performance. Assessment is much more than just measuring learning outcomes: it
is an instrument to improve teaching, the curriculum and conditions for learners’
learning. The question is why the negativity about testing if assessment is associated
with effective teaching. Since South Africa became a democratic country, it has been
struggling with low levels of literacy. Poor performance of South African learners in
basic literacy in national and international tests has moved the Department of Basic
Education (DoBE) since 2010 to place more emphasis on systemic tests as a way of
securing an improvement in learner performance. However, many researchers have
blamed the emphasis placed on standardised tests for the poor state of our education
system. More and more voices are going up for improved teacher development and
more support to teachers and learners. In this article, I shall argue that too much
emphasis is placed on standardized tests, and not much is being done to develop
teachers in providing a balanced teaching and learning experience to learners. I
shall indicate that the continual testing of learners’ performance in literacy through
systemic and standardised tests has not led to improved reading ability, but has
in fact contributed to a decline in learners’ creativity, innovation and independent
thinking, and the skills needed to leapfrog this country into the 21st century. These
tests emphasised the skills involved in taking multiple-choice tests over those of
researching, analysing, experimenting and writing, the tools that students will more likely need to be great thinkers, excellent university students and valued employees. I
will argue that today’s children spend too much time preparing for tests and this has
come at the expense of a broader education in other subjects. Drilling pupils to pass
tests does not help their longer-term learning and results in a narrower curriculum,
poorer standards of teaching and lower quality of education. The point I want to make
is that teachers have learnt very fast how to coach for the tests, which led to inflated
results. Thus, while test scores have risen, educational standards might actually have
declined. Therefore, rather than adding new measurements of progress, schools
need to move away from data and towards a more holistic approach to assessing
educational quality. I shall also argue that we must assess students’ work throughout
the year by means of portfolios, rather than by means of a narrow snapshot of
learning measured on one test day. As Jordaan (2010) puts it, we need to ensure that
learning is not simply assessment-driven. Students are highly intelligent people; if we
confront them with a game where learning is linked to a rigid and monotonous diet
of assessment, they will learn according to the rules of that game. To improve their
learning, we need to improve our game.
Description
Keywords
Assessment-based criteria, Assessment-driven tests, Educational standards, Learner performance, Learning outcomes, Standardized tests, Systemic tests
Citation
Le Cordeur, M. (2014). Constantly weighing the pig will not make it grow: do teachers teach assessment tests or the curriculum?. Perspectives in Education: Standards in education and training: the challenge, 32(1), 142-157.