Testing and teaching: Two sides of the same coin?

Abstract

It is common among teachers, in the United States, to complain about the time devoted to testing. They argue that they could teach more if they could test students less, and on the surface, their arguments seem compelling. There has been considerable growth in the use of tests for decisions that are not always directly related to classroom instruction. Tests will be used by the Council of Chief State School Officers, beginning in 1987, to rate the average performance of students within each of the fifty states which comprise the United States (Sirkin, 1985), and presently tests are being used by policy makers and the media to rank school districts within many of the states. In at least one state, tests are used by the state to award cash bonuses to school personnel if their students' academic growth from one year to the next falls within the upper twenty-five percent of the distribution of test scores. While these uses are only remotely related to teaching, they unfortunately have fueled teacher resistance to the use of tests for formative evaluation of instruction.