Tests and Learning

Over the last couple of decades I have heard many people, often teachers, complain that requiring standardized testing is a bad idea.  They complain that it inhibits child-directed learning, that it can damage self-esteem, that it promotes "teaching to the test" rather than true understanding of the subject.  There are also complaints that standardized tests are a bad way to determine whether a pupil actually understands something because some children don't "test" as well as other students.

The alternative is the idea of a teacher introducing a subject and the pupils then explore that subject by asking questions, being exposed to answers, talking about the subject as a group, interacting with experiments or direct exposure.  This is essentially the idea of learning through playing.  At the end of this process it is proposed that children have a better experience, understand a subject more thoroughly/deeply, and without relying on rote answers that must be produced in a stressful environment.

At the moment I am attempting to learn two separate skills, playing the mandolin and learning Spanish.  Both of these are long term projects that are essentially impossible to perfect.  At no point will I ever be unable to play the mandolin better than I can at that moment, and I will never be entirely colloquially fluent in Spanish.

I am attempting to learn Spanish through a computer program called Rosetta Stone, which says that it teaches language in the same way that young children learn languages.  Basically it teaches words, pictures and sounds all together to produce associations with meaning.  At no point are any linguistic terms (like verb, noun, conjugation, tense etc.) mentioned.  There is a picture of a house, the word "casa" is put on the screen, and a native speaker says, "casa."  At no point does anyone say "The word for house is casa", there is no other language but Spanish used within the program.  Once associations have been made everything else is a test.  A word is said and you need to pick a picture, or vice versa.  It shows a picture with the words of a child having lost its dog, and then shows a picture of a man looking for his newspaper and asks you what should be said.  A correct answer gets you a green check mark and a happy "bling" sound.  An incorrect answer gets you an orange cross and a negative "bong" sound.  Often you don't even have the tools to answer the question and have to guess.

While using this program you can almost see the parent showing you, the child, something and saying, "What's that?   No, try again.  Nearly.  It's a tree.  Can you say, 'tree?'  No, tree".  Children learn language by being introduced to concepts, asked to repeat them, and told whether they are right or wrong.  When children are young they are told that they are doing something wrong all the time, and children learn things much faster than adults.  As an adult this can be monumentally frustrating, and I'm sure it is for children too.  It can make you feel stupid.  It doesn't attempt to get you to understand the subject deeply, it just wants you to know and understand what is happening, the depth of understanding arises from that.  The thing humans do best is speak, and language is the most complicated subject most of us will ever encounter.

I have attempted to learn the mandolin largely on my own.  I have looked up such things as where to put your fingers for chords, and the particular notes for songs.  I had one lesson and unfortunately the teacher was a great mandolin player who didn't know how to teach.  As a result I cannot read music, I have almost no music theory, I have never played a scale, I don't even know the name of the notes on the fretboard.  I have no fundamentals at all, but I can play some songs well enough that they sound like songs.  Learning how to play music is literally nothing but tests, and with the most direct and clear differentiation between passing and failing that you will find.  Play a note badly and the sound will be immediately obvious.  Play it well and it will sound like music.  Every time you make any sound it is a test as to whether you can make music or not.  At the beginning you fail many more times than you succeed, and as you try to learn more and more this truism remains.  Learning music is an unceasing series of tests, most of which you will fail, and it is immediately obvious that you have failed.

It seems to me that by far the most effective method of learning things is through testing.  In the educational environment students should be tested almost continuously.  When the answer is wrong the student should be told it is wrong and to go back and try again.  There are certain things that have to be learned in school, and you should be tested on these things and not allowed to progress until you learn those things.  It is pointless to attempt to teach almost anything until someone can read at a high level.  It is vitally important that children learn a standardized set of skills, somewhat less important that they learn a standardized set of knowledge.  This is how young children learn, and they do it extremely well.

As for the self-esteem/some children test badly argument my response is that life is entirely full of tests.  Any employment you get is simply a series of tests.  Fail the test and you will (or more accurately, should) get fired.  To get a job you will be tested.  Driving a car is a set of tests.  Meeting new people is a test.  As a result it is far more important to test children with low self-esteem and bad testing skills than other children.  One of the fundamental skills required in life is to face up to a test.  Fearfully avoiding tests cripples a life, it is a mental illness called General Anxiety Disorder.  It is no accident that in the USA, with its resistance to difficult tests (in English high school a passing grade was 50%, in US college it was more like 65%, and not because the US college students were smarter) that test scores are low but self-esteem is high.

A large problem is, of course, the tests themselves.  Standardized sets of skills and knowledge is not the same as identical tests and answers.  Multiple choice tests are the most convenient, inexpensive, labor saving method of testing, but they are a terrible way of finding out what is known.  I remember in a chemistry class in high school a bone idle student who was completely indifferent to learning got over half the answers right on a test.  This was a shock to everyone (including the student) and the teacher asked him how he had done it.  He had simply done a zig-zag pattern on the answer sheet without even reading the questions.  I remember studying for the SAT college entrance exam, and finding out that I could get the English comprehension questions right over half the time without reading what I was supposed to comprehend.  I had learned the test and the sort of answers they looked for.

Tests should have open ended questions.  Asking a student to pick from a through e answers as to the correct conjugation of the "informal you" future tense of "to go" is moronically stupid when you can ask (in French) 'Qu'est'ce que tu vas faire la semaine prochaine?" or "Que vas a hacer la semana que viene? (In Spanish).  "What are you going to do next week?" requires an understanding of the question, an ability to conjugate in the future tense, and the ability to convert ideas into language.  In one question you are testing for much more than a single multiple choice question.  It might take a human being to read and grade the answer, but ask twenty questions like that in half an hour and you'll get ten times the measurement of understanding that you would from a multiple choice test.  How could such a system possibly work?  Have teachers run the tests and grade them, and repeat them, and then simply surprise audit the teachers.

Education should be a series of hard tests, repeated until the children get them right.  These tests should be practical, starting with real life details and then human beings naturally look for the underlying features.  Teach an underlying feature first, and it's simply baffling.  I never learned what the future plu-perfect tense is in English, and I speak that language fluently.  When learning French I was repeatedly asked to "conjugate" a "verb" in a "tense", when until learning a different language I had no idea what "conjugate" "verb" or "tense" meant.  I ended my ability to study mathematics when we got to differential calculus because nobody told me what you did with it, or what it was for, or how it would be applied. 

I think schools should be challenging places, but challenges interspersed with far more free, entertainment time than they have now.  You shouldn't try to teach more than one idea a class, and that class shouldn't be more than half an hour long.  Every other class, at a minimum, should be testing of knowledge not just from last week, or last month, but last year as well.  Those classes should be hard work.  In between each class children should be free to relax, so that their minds can absorb the information and rest.  Homework is useless and moronic.

I am a big believer in tests.  I think they should be more common rather than less common.  I think they should be much harder than they are presently, and I think you should have to repeat them until you can pass them, otherwise what is the point of trying to learn?  I think testing should not be of just the last class, or the last year, but throughout the entire process of learning the subject.

Test more, test harder, be less sympathetic, test more practically, burn all multiple choice tests.