Education Week - October 28, 2015 - 28

COMMENTARY

The Effective Use of Testing:
What the Research Says

Gregory Ferrand for Education Week

By John Hattie

uch of the testing discussion in the United States
today is grounded on several widely accepted notions: that we first must
get the actual assessment
instrument right, that
there is an important distinction between "formative" and "summative" assessment, that teachers need to understand the
language of assessment, and that we should drop
tests on schools like "precision bombs" for the purpose of measuring a student's performance and
progress.
These notions are misguided, as decades of research from around the world on what matters
most in student learning demonstrates. In fact, the
major purpose of assessment in schools should be
to provide interpretative information to teachers
and school leaders about their impact on students,
so that these educators have the best information
possible about what steps to take with instruction
and how they need to change and adapt.
So often we use assessment in schools to inform students of their progress and attainment.
Of course this is important, but it is more critical
to use this information to inform teachers about
their impact on students. Using assessments as
feedback for teachers is powerful. And this power
is truly maximized when the assessments are
timely, informative, and related to what teachers
are actually teaching.
We hardly need more data-schools are awash
with data. Instead, we need better interpretations of these data. When we built the New Zealand school assessment system 15 years ago, we
started by designing the reports, rather than the
tests. The reports were piloted to ensure we met
our own two criteria:
* Did the teachers and school leaders interpret
the reports correctly? (And if not, we needed to
change the reports.)
* Was there a consequential action from the
reports?
After many iterations of the reports, we were
able to meet these criteria, and then, and only
then, we backfilled them with great assessment
items. The reports, not the tests, are what matter
to teachers and school leaders; they are hungry
for information to help them know their impact on
their students. At the system level, policymakers
are happy to receive continual information on the
status of learning in the country without all the
negativity that comes with high-stakes testing.
Given that the New Zealand assessment system
is voluntary, it's worth noting that a majority of
teachers and schools still use it today, 15 years
later.
Until we see tests as aids to enhance teaching
and learning, and not primarily as barometers
of how much a student knows now, on this day,
on this test, then developing more tests will add

| INSIDE |

DO MILITARY
RECRUITERS
BELONG IN
SCHOOLS?

little, and will remain an expensive distraction.
Educators need to understand what each student
already knows, and where that student needs to
go next in the teaching process. They need to be
experts in using an array of interventions to help
get their students to success, and to evaluate the
impact that they've made.
As an education researcher, I know this because
I spent more than 15 years collecting nearly 1,200
meta-analyses of 65,000 education studies focused
on the learning of more than 250 million students
around the world. Because almost any education intervention can claim some positive effect
on learning, I developed a threshold to determine
effect.
Far and away the most effective teaching intervention we found was what I call "visible learning": raising the quality of the feedback teachers
receive about their impact. Expert teachers assess
the visible impact they have on their students,

28 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 28, 2015 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

ON THE
AP U.S. HISTORY
FRAMEWORK

constantly monitor learning and seek feedback
about their teaching, and then evaluate and adjust their teaching methods based on these findings. Teachers show students how to self-assess
their own performance, and discuss how they can
improve. These are the major influences for raising achievement.
Students can be beneficiaries of assessment,
provided we start by asking, "Who owns the test
data?" The answer must be the students-it is
their schooling, their lives, their futures that are
at stake in classrooms-and so the focus should
be first on developing "student assessment capabilities." It is then incumbent on teachers to teach
students how to know when the best time to asPAGE 23 >

Students can be
beneficiaries of
assessment,
provided we
start by asking,
'Who owns the
test data?' "

JOHN HATTIE is a professor of education and the director
of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the
University of Melbourne, Australia.

UNEARTHING
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BENEATH
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Education Week - October 28, 2015

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