On testing
‘Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.’
- Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
How on earth can testing help us feel good about our work? Well, when we put ourselves under a bit of pressure, to do something we find difficult, to go through where we might have got something wrong, we are able to clock very clearly how far we have come. Just one additional correct response helps us to realise that with a bit of application, stuff can stick and that we can get better.
This is how it works. We might read something which we need to be learning about. We then make notes of the key points. We then ask ourselves to describe the key points without going back to the original piece. How much did we remember, how much was missing? In the process of trying to recall we are doing two things. We are setting up the conditions for the neural networks to be stronger, to make sense of the material, so that it remains in the long-term memory and we can recall it at a future date. The very process of testing ourselves, under the right conditions makes us brighter.
And the second thing that happens is that we can see very clearly just how far we have come. This is what I was able to recall at the beginning. Having checked, reread and tested myself again, I can see the difference. This builds resilience at the deepest level and provides the bedrock of hope that, with a bit of effort I can get better, I can see how I might improve this in the future. Daniel Willingham has written about how testing can improve performance, and interestingly, one of the findings from the small-scale research was that frequent testing resulted in less rather than more anxiety.
Tests are an unavoidable fact of life. Whether it is for a driving test, school examinations or professional qualifications they are an indicator of proficiency. A marker that something has been achieved. And they are usually dreaded because the stakes are high, either we pass or we don’t. But the kind of testing referred to here is the self-testing where no one is watching, no one is criticising and no one is making us feel inadequate. We are creating our own conditions for checking what we know, understand and can do. It is a private matter and no one is going to check whether we have passed or failed. This is the important distinction. Testing is being used as a deliberate tool to help us improve. And in doing so, help us to feel hopeful, not helpless. If I couldn’t grasp this before and now I can what happened? I put a bit of effort in and I improved. It is as simple as that.
How might this work in the classroom? Well the first thing is, that the high stakes element has to be removed. There should be no penalties for getting something wrong. This is just checking what we know and what we need to do to improve. Tests can provide a very concrete way for children and their teachers to see their progress. Particularly when the results are monitored over time. They are the fundamentals of ensuring that children have the basics. We couldn’t do our six times tables two weeks ago, but now we can.
The language around this is important. In talking about this work with children, it is important that this is not about failure it is about checking what we know, what we don’t know and to see how far we have come on the one hand, and how far we can go on the other.
The element of improvement and competitiveness needs to be set against what the child could or could not do before, and what they can do now. This is not about measuring children against one another. These are personal, not public, milestones. But they help to make the learning visible. The bottom line is, ‘I couldn’t do this before, and now I can.’
Making the progress visible is a fundamental aspect of supporting children to feel hopeful not helpless. It also helps to support meta-cognition and talking about the learning. What was it that made the difference between then and now? What did I do to get this level of progress? What was the effort I put in? What were the things I used to help me to get better? What does it feel like to see how far I have come? And in doing this, we support children to be hopeful, not helpless.
One of the ways to minimise the potential threat and fear of this, is to get children to set their own tests. What do they need to get sharper at? What do they need to improve? So, there might be a generic test for the whole class. And as a result of that, what do individual children need to practise to get right next time? This means that the teacher is holding the bigger picture, whether it is times tables or spellings and then allowing children to self-regulate by realising that there are some things which they need to go back and do again. This turns it into a journey of improvement rather than a shallow test. And it is deeply satisfying, because the evidence is there for the child as an individual to see and to take pride in their improvement.
There is no shame in not knowing something; there is only shame in not trying. It is in the trying that deep learning takes place, in the retrieval of information that secures long-term memory. And once the initial lack of confidence is overcome, it becomes deeply satisfying and as a by-product of that actually enjoyable. It moves from feeling hopeless to hopeful and is a way of working which will have implications beyond the classroom. We need to encourage our pupils to say ‘I just need to go back and revisit this’. Because it is in the revisiting that the learning goes deeper.