Why assessment is good for teachers and students

Buttons have a bad name. But a condition for professional autonomy, also for teachers, is that you can be accountable for the quality of your work and the choices you have made in it. This is one of the reasons why we have tests in education. Valid, reliable and nationally comparable tests can provide teachers and schools with valuable information about the results of their efforts.

With this information they can, if necessary, improve their education. They can also give parents good insight into the knowledge and skills that their child may or may not have mastered. The results of these tests can also give rise to peer exchanges; if a school with a similar population succeeds and you don’t, it might be interesting to take a look there.

Resistance

The current resistance to testing is probably due to the fact that there is currently a lot of testing in education and that these tests are not always ‘valid, reliable and nationally comparable’. In addition, they – it already starts in group 3 – are often ‘norm-based’: you mainly gain insight into how well you score compared to others. Compare it to a 100 meter sprint, where only one can be the winner.

These types of keys have a selecting function, but professionally speaking, that is of little use. What you want as a teacher to be ‘criterion-based’ tests: have my students achieved the set educational goals or not? Compare this with pole vaulting: students cross the bar, or not (yet). These types of tests have an evaluative function, which you can use professionally.

Intelligence Tests

The current tests in education mainly resemble general intelligence tests, while it would therefore be more obvious to test whether students master the subject matter that has recently been taught. Now we come to the crux of the problem: every school is different. In the Netherlands there is no clearly specified curriculum that states what students should at least have mastered per year.

The Education Council has now also concluded this in its recently published report Language and math in the crosshairs. The council advisesformulate crystal-clear goals for language and arithmetic‘ and ‘systematically monitor whether pupils achieve the goals’ in groups 5 and 8 of primary education, in class 2 or 3 and in the last year of secondary education and secondary vocational education. In MBO there is currently no insight at all into how many students leave the program with (almost) low literacy and/or low grade.

New institute

So bring on those tests, but make sure they fit in well with the national curriculum – which has yet to be determined – and that they are valid, reliable and nationally comparable. Place the makers of that curriculum and the associated tests in a joint building with the name National Institute for Curriculum and Test Development (RICT) on it.

That sounds good and immediately makes the educational landscape a bit clearer, instead of becoming more complex. If school teams subsequently prove successful in their approach, they are given all the autonomy, and if they make a mess of it, the government can intervene (in other words, in accordance with Article 23 of the Constitution: ‘guarantee the soundness’ of education).

Oh yes, then there is the argument of the pathetic children, because tests are so stressful. Well, a little stress from time to time is part of life and can’t hurt at all. It would help a lot if adults themselves were not hysterical about those tests, then children really do not suffer. And you know what’s really pathetic? Young people who leave school with low literacy and/or low grades, can’t get a job or a partner, can’t make a household budget, are bottled up on all sides and don’t understand what’s in the newspaper. That’s just pathetic.