When I taught in the UK, I used to do an in-class test every second week, for all of my classes. Yes, I would record the scores for my own personal markbook, but the scores didn't count towards the school's assessment of the students. I found it worked really well... although I wish I knew more about the different ways of testing at the time!
When I moved to Australia, I found the culture very much against testing. One school (I no longer teach at) was infatuated with "pre-testing"... they gave students a test on a topic, which would usually waste an entire lesson, before the content was taught, expecting the results to be very bad. It did not particularly inform the "teaching" because even if every student in a class knows a topic, us teachers had to provide evidence that we had taught it anyway. But it allowed the school to show the post-topic test as evidence of how much the students had learned. Literally a scheme to protect teachers and nothing else. And it meant less time to actually teach.
Oh, and there was very little, if any, corrective feedback. That was a great skill I had learned from UK teaching, completely ignored at this Australian school.
Enough ranting... thanks for this article. It has reminded me of my need to keep pushing for better teaching methods, and I'm going to find more opportunities for "retrieval". (I love how the change of language makes people on board with an idea they've been trained to oppose!)
I agree with this, apart from a bit of the pre-test. If it is knowledge based it can be very short-10 to 15 minutes. Bjork (learning and forgetting lab) says it makes the brain pay attention to those facts when it later meets them. It is to create progress rather than spuriously prove progress
When I taught in the UK, I used to do an in-class test every second week, for all of my classes. Yes, I would record the scores for my own personal markbook, but the scores didn't count towards the school's assessment of the students. I found it worked really well... although I wish I knew more about the different ways of testing at the time!
When I moved to Australia, I found the culture very much against testing. One school (I no longer teach at) was infatuated with "pre-testing"... they gave students a test on a topic, which would usually waste an entire lesson, before the content was taught, expecting the results to be very bad. It did not particularly inform the "teaching" because even if every student in a class knows a topic, us teachers had to provide evidence that we had taught it anyway. But it allowed the school to show the post-topic test as evidence of how much the students had learned. Literally a scheme to protect teachers and nothing else. And it meant less time to actually teach.
Oh, and there was very little, if any, corrective feedback. That was a great skill I had learned from UK teaching, completely ignored at this Australian school.
Enough ranting... thanks for this article. It has reminded me of my need to keep pushing for better teaching methods, and I'm going to find more opportunities for "retrieval". (I love how the change of language makes people on board with an idea they've been trained to oppose!)
I agree with this, apart from a bit of the pre-test. If it is knowledge based it can be very short-10 to 15 minutes. Bjork (learning and forgetting lab) says it makes the brain pay attention to those facts when it later meets them. It is to create progress rather than spuriously prove progress