Educators, Parents Hold Mixed Views on Testing

Survey finds less interest in year-end tests for students

Parents, teachers, and district administrators consider formative and interim tests far more valuable than summative assessments, according to a recent survey.

And if state test results arrive more than a month after they were given, most parents don’t find them very valuable, the survey found.

The study was intended to shed light on those three groups’ views of tests as key assessment policy is being shaped at the state and national levels.

Federal lawmakers are considering legislation to rewrite the No Child Left Behind Act, which launched a new era of testing and accountability a decade ago. Many state policymakers are implementing teacher-evaluation systems based in part on students’ test scores. And two groups of states are using federal Race to the Top dollars to design new tests for common academic standards.

“What the data show is that parents, teachers, and administrators think that summative tests don’t give them the information they consider most valuable, and yet the pendulum has swung so far in that direction that there is a risk to other kinds of tests that actually help children learn,” said Matt Chapman, the president and chief executive officer ofNorthwest Evaluation Association, the Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit research and test-development organization that commissioned the study, released Feb. 8. “It’s an incredibly important time to have that conversation.”

The survey, conducted by Grunwald Associates of Bethesda, Md., was given online to a nationally representative sample of about 1,000 K-12 teachers, 1,000 parents of K-12 students, and 200 school district administrators. It probed attitudes about summative tests, which measure what students have learned at the end of the year; interim tests, the periodic tests that measure learning over a shorter time frame; and formative tests, a range of ways of gauging how well students are learning material as it is being taught.

When parents were asked which types of tests were “extremely” or “very” important to them, 85 percent chose formative assessments, 67 percent cited interim tests, and 44 percent chose summative tests.

Researchers asked parents how helpful the different types of tests are for various purposes. On every one of 12 purposes offered, they assigned significantly more value to formative/interim tests than they did to summative tests. Seven in 10 said formative/interim tests were helpful to them in guiding their child’s homework, for instance, while 47 percent said the same of summative tests.

Teachers and district administrators, too, gave formative and interim tests higher marks ...

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