Frequent testing is not good for learners; it undermines education

Testing of students is an excellent strategy to keep students on track and also to assess learning. However, their frequent testing is counterproductive. It doesn’t follow that the more tests learners take, the better prepared they are to sit for the national examinations.

There are two main dangers in administering tests at short intervals to learners. The two dangers lead to one thing. The students don’t do correspondingly well as expected.

According to a National Assessment Centre Monitoring Learner Achievement (NASMULA) at Class 3 report on Literacy and Numeracy in Kenya by the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec), pupils who were subjected to frequent testing performed worse than those who were not tested frequently.

The learners didn’t do well because they were stupid. They didn’t do well because the frequency of tests took away the instructional time—the time for teaching and learning.

It is instructional time that provides students with an opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills that form the substance of the syllabus or the curriculum.

Policymakers designate certain Basic Learning Competencies—literacy, numeracy and life skills—at primary and secondary levels. The syllabus has content which learners ought to be acquainted with upon exiting the primary and secondary education cycle.

Policymakers have allocated time for teaching, learning and testing. The tests at school level are purely for diagnostic purposes - to assess the quality of teaching and learning taking place and address gaps in either teaching or learning.

Frequent tests make nonsense of this purpose of testing. Frequent testing means that schools are exposing learners to material or content that has either not been taught or is not taught properly. Children who consistently score poorly in tests because they have not been properly prepared may start thinking that they are not good enough for primary or secondary education. They give up yet they have potential that has not been tapped.

Knec urges teachers to be cautious about the number of tests subjected to pupils, bearing in mind that testing should be geared towards assessing learners’ acquisition of competencies stipulated in the curriculum within a specific period.

The problem of frequent testing or examination is not a problem peculiar to Kenya. It is a prevalent problem in the USA where the Federal Government and State Governments demand accountability from schools as a basis for financial support.

A leading Historian of Education, Dianne Ravitch observes in her book, ‘The death and life of the great American school system’: “When students practice the test day after day, they learn to take the test, but the scores may not indicate their skill or knowledge. We have adopted a national strategy designed to raise the scores without the necessity of improving the quality of education.”

Secondly, preparing test items or questions is time consuming and intellectually draining. The frequency with which schools administer tests to students doesn’t allow them to meticulously prepare to teach the syllabus. The actual teaching itself, where multiple teaching methods are called for depending on the concepts at hand, is not a walk in the park either.

There are a number of troubling issues around education associated with tests not prepared by the teachers at the school level. One is that the test items may contain questions on topics not yet covered. The child stumbles into a question before he/she comes across the concept or topic on which he is being tested. The multiple types of questions in KCPE will allow him/her to choose at random the right answer without reasoning. When the teachers eventually revises with the children, they may simply provide them with the right answers to the questions without explaining the rationale. That is where rote learning is abused. Being told the answer to a question without understanding the rationale for the answer.