Importance And Functions Of Tests 2a1y4g

Polytechnic University of the Philippines College of Education Bachelor in Elementary and Secondary

Education

Sta. Mesa, Manila

MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION

A report on: IMPORTANCE AND FUNCTIONS OF TEST IN EDUCATION

SUBMITTED BY: Cuarto, Ronalyn R. Del Rosario, Venn Marijan F. German, Andrea Pancho, Melissa Anne Marie A. Quiton, Joshua Lloyd L. Relano, Maria Concepcion O. Ribano, Nicole B.

SUBMITTED TO: Prof. Jay-R A. Manamtam BSEDEN 4-1D June 21, 2015 Introduction

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Educational assessment typically is initiated when a student has difficulty meeting expectations for academic performance. There are many standardized tests and procedures that can be used to identify a student’s academic strengths and limitations, as well as his or her competence in domains that contribute to academic achievement, such as language and cognition. However, school professionals recognize that effective school performance also depends on a student’s ability to perform a variety of functional tasks that enable him or her to participate in the various learning activities of the school day. These functional tasks are often referred to as nonacademic tasks. Students with disabilities often have difficulty meeting performance expectations on these tasks because of limitations resulting from their physical or cognitive impairments. Therefore, performance on nonacademic tasks needs to be included in an assessment of a student’s educational difficulties. In many situations, efforts to minimize or compensate for these functional limitations may be a central focus of the student’s special education program. Why is Assessment Important? Assessment is important because of all the decisions you will make about children when teaching and caring for them. The decisions facing our three teachers at the beginning of this chapter all involve how best to educate children. Like them, you will be called upon every day to make decisions before, during, and after your teaching. Whereas some of these decisions will seem small and inconsequential, others will be “high stakes,” influencing the life course of children. All of your assessment decisions taken as a whole will direct and alter children’s learning outcomes. Below outlines for you some purposes of assessment and how assessment can enhance your teaching and student learning. All of these purposes are important; if you use assessment procedures appropriately, you will help all children learn well. The following general principles should guide both policies and practices for the assessment of young children: 

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Assessment should bring about benefits for children. Gathering accurate information from young children is difficult and potentially stressful. Assessments must have a clear benefit—either in direct services to the child or in improved quality of educational programs. Assessment should be tailored to a specific purpose and should be reliable, valid, and fair for that purpose. Assessments designed for one purpose are not necessarily valid if used for other purposes. In the past, many of the abuses of testing with young children have occurred because of misuse. Assessment policies should be designed recognizing that reliability and validity of assessments increase with children’s age. The younger the child, the more difficult it is to obtain reliable and valid assessment data. It is particularly difficult to assess children’s cognitive abilities accurately before age six. Because of problems with reliability and validity, some types of assessment should be postponed until children are older, while other types of assessment can be pursued, but only with necessary safeguards. Assessment should be age appropriate in both content and the method of data collection. Assessments of young children should address the full range of early learning and development, including physical well-being and motor development;

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social and emotional development; approaches toward learning; language development; and cognition and general knowledge. Methods of assessment should recognize that children need familiar contexts to be able to demonstrate their abilities. Abstract paper-and-pencil tasks may make it especially difficult for young children to show what they know. Assessment should be linguistically appropriate, recognizing that to some extent all assessments are measures of language. Regardless of whether an assessment is intended to measure early reading skills, knowledge of color names, or learning potential, assessment results are easily confounded by language proficiency, especially for children who come from home backgrounds with limited exposure to English, for whom the assessment would essentially be an assessment of their English proficiency. Each child’s first- and second-language development should be taken into when determining appropriate assessment methods and in interpreting the meaning of assessment results. Parents should be a valued source of assessment information, as well as an audience for assessment. Because of the fallibility of direct measures of young children, assessments should include multiple sources of evidence, especially reports from parents and teachers. Assessment results should be shared with parents as part of an ongoing process that involves parents in their child’s education.

Purposes of Assessment Children  Identify what children know  Identify children's special needs  Determine appropriate placement  Select appropriate curricula to meet children's individual needs  Refer children and, as appropriate, their families for additional services to programs and agencies Families  Communicate with parents to provide information about their children's progress and learning  Relate school activities to home activities and experiences Early Childhood Programs  Make policy decisions regarding what is and is not appropriate for children  Determine how well and to what extent programs and services children receive are beneficial and appropriate Early Childhood Teachers  Identify children's skills, abilities, and needs  Make lesson and activity plans and set goals  Create new classroom arrangements  Select materials  Make decisions about how to implement learning activities  Report to parents and families about children's developmental status and achievement  Monitor and improve the teaching-learning process Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

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  The   

Meet the individual needs of children Group for instruction Public Inform the public regarding children's achievement Provide information relating to student's school-wide achievements Provide a basis for public policy (e.g., legislation, recommendations, and statements)

Benefits of testing? Surely, to most educators, this statement represents an oxymoron. Testing in schools is usually thought to serve only the purpose of evaluating students and asg them grades. Those are important reasons for tests, but not what we have in mind. Most teachers view tests (and other forms of assessment, such as homework, essays, and papers) as necessary evils. Yes, students study and learn more when given assignments and tests, but they are an ordeal for both the student (who must complete them) and the teacher (who must construct and grade them). Quizzes and tests are given frequently in elementary schools, often at the rate of several or more a week, but testing decreases in frequency the higher a student rises in the educational system. By the time students are in college, they may be given only a midterm exam and a final exam in many introductory level courses. Of course, standardized tests are also given to students to assess their relative performance compared to other students in their country and assign them a percentile ranking. Besides these direct effects of testing, there are also indirect effects that are quite positive. If students are quizzed frequently, they tend to study more and with more regularity. Quizzes also permit students to discover gaps in their knowledge and focus study efforts on difficult material; furthermore, when students study after taking a test, they learn more from the study episode than if they had not taken the test. Quizzing also enables better metacognitive monitoring for both students and teachers because it provides as to how well learning is progressing. Greater learning would occur in educational settings if students used self-testing as a study strategy and were quizzed more frequently in class. Published tests and assessments can play an important role in understanding and improving student learning in colleges and universities by adding dimensions and perspectives not available through locally developed tests, rubrics, and surveys. Published tests give colleges a sense of how their students compare against their peers, and some published tests provide detailed that lets colleges easily identify relative strengths and weaknesses in their students’ performance. And because published tests and assessments are typically developed by testing professionals, the quality of test questions and problems may be superior to what faculty and staff at individual colleges can develop. The Purpose of Tests What is the reason why teachers give students tests? Why do school districts and states create high stakes tests for their students? On one level, the answer to this seems fairly obvious: the reason why we give tests is to see what students have learned. However, this only tells part of the story. Tests have many purposes in our schools. One thing that Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

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should be stressed is that in the end, tests should be for the benefit of the student and not the teacher, school, district, or state. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Following is a look at some of the major reasons why students are given assessments in and out of the classroom. 1. To Identify What Students Have Learned The obvious point of classroom tests is to see what the students have learned after the completion of a lesson or unit. When the classroom tests are tied to effectively written lesson objectives, the teacher can analyze the results to see where the majority of the students are having problems with in their class. These tests are also important when discussing student progress at parent-teacher conferences.

2. To Identify Student Strengths and Weaknesses Another use of tests is to determine student strengths and weaknesses. One effective example of this is when teachers use pretests at the beginning of units in order to find out what students already know and where the teacher's focus needs to be. Further, learning style and multiple intelligences tests help teachers learn how to best meet the needs of their students through instructional techniques.

3. To Provide a Method for Awards and Recognition Tests can be used as a way to determine who will receive awards and recognition. For example, the PSAT is often given in the 10th grade to students across the nation. If a student is a National Merit Scholar due to the results on this test, they are offered scholarships and other forms of recognition.

4. To Gain College Credit Advanced Placement exams provide students with the opportunity to earn college credit after successfully completing a course and ing the exam with high marks. While every university has its own rules on what scores to accept, most do give credit for these exams. In many cases, students are able to begin college with a semester or even a year's worth of credits under their belts. 5. To Provide a Way to Measure a Teacher and/or School's Effectiveness Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

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More and more states are tying funding to schools to the way that students perform on standardized tests. Further some states are attempting to use these results when they evaluation and give merit raises to the teachers themselves. This use of high stakes testing is often contentious with educators since many factors can influence a student's grade on an exam. Additionally, controversy can sometimes erupt over the number of hours schools use to specifically 'teach to the test' as they prepare students to take these exams.

6. To Provide a Basis for Entry into an Internship, Program, or College Tests have traditionally been used as a way to judge a student based on merit. Additionally, students might be required to take additional exams to get into special programs or be placed properly in classes. For example, a student who has taken a few years of high school French might be required to an exam in order to be placed in the correct year of French.

Yet another concern with published tests and assessments available for higher education is that they often have more limited evidence of their quality than published tests used in basic education. While validation studies at the K-12 level can involve tens of thousands of students, studies of higher education tests often involve far smaller numbers of students from institutions that may not be a representative sample of all colleges and universities. While test publishers continue to work diligently to research and document the validity and reliability of their tests, at this time we cannot have the same level of confidence in higher education test results that we have at the K-12 level. Published tests and assessments can yield valuable insight into student learning at the higher education level, but only if (1) they correspond to the college’s goals for student learning, (2) they yield useful that will help the college identify areas that need improvement, (3) they have convincing evidence of their quality (validity and reliability), and (4) students have compelling incentives to give the tests their best effort. Because there is no one perfect instrument, published tests and assessments should only be used in combination with other evidence of student learning, including locally-developed measures, job placement rates, and the like, in order to draw a more accurate overall picture of student learning. All who are concerned with the future of American higher education can take steps to ensure that students graduate with appropriate knowledge, skills, and competencies. First, we can continue to the American system of accreditation, which requires all accredited colleges to provide clear, compelling, and appropriate evidence of rigorous student achievement. Second, we can continue to value the rich diversity of American higher education and acknowledge that no one test can adequately evaluate the knowledge, skills, and competencies expected of all of America’s college students. Finally, we can encourage the development and use of assessment tools appropriate to each field of study and each Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

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sector of American higher education, so that all students graduate fully prepared for successful careers and productive service to society. REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS http://www.education.com/reference/article/why-assessment-important/ http://images.pearsonclinical.com/images/assets/SFA/SFAOverview.pdf http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF%27s/BC_Roediger%20et%20al %20%282011%29_PLM.pdf https://www.msche.org/publications/published-instruments-in-higher-education.pdf Notes 4. L. Shepard, S. L. Kagan, and E. Wurtz, Principles and Recommendations for Early Childhood Assessments (Washington, DC: National Education Goals , December 14, 1998), 5-6.

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