Tests should count less often in primary and secondary education for reports, diplomas, admission to school or transfer of students. That advises the Education Council in the report on Thursday Look at assessment differently. Instead, tests should be used more often to help learning, without too much depending on it. This requires a “cultural change” at many schools, the council writes in the advice, “because they have to look at testing in a different way.”
The House of Representatives asked the Education Council to provide advice on the testing culture in education, with a view to the renewal of the ‘core objectives’ and ‘attainment targets’ for primary and secondary education. These are being revised for the first time in almost twenty years and a draft version of the new goals has now been submitted to the Senate. The Education Council considered the question of what role tests should play for the new core objectives and final objectives for education.
By the time students complete secondary education, they have taken a large number of tests, “usually hundreds,” writes chair of the Education Council Louise Elffers, also special professor of Equality of Opportunity in Education at Utrecht University, in the foreword to the advice.
According to the council, these tests now have several functions: they serve as support for learning, as a selection tool and as an evaluation of the educational quality of schools. These functions must be better separated, because students, teachers and schools can become “entangled” in them, according to the council.
Tests must be used in a targeted manner, says Elffers. “Due to the mixing of functions, tests often overshoot their target, resulting in unnecessarily high pressure on students, teachers and schools.”
The tests that are used with students for ‘selection’ – such as determining the most suitable school level, the decision whether or not to transfer or whether or not to obtain a diploma – must be “easily comparable and of high quality”, the advice further states. Otherwise, “inequality of opportunity lurks.”
For the progression test, which students take in group 8, the council therefore advocates one test from one provider. Schools can now choose from tests from six different providers, but the question is whether they are properly comparable. An analysis by the PO Council, the interest group for primary education, showed last year that schools that switched to a different progression test often achieved better test performance.
