This post is about the power of tests as learning events. But first allow me to share a memory of my very earliest teaching days…
My first school placement was an institution that twitched daily for fear of an Ofsted inspection. And when the Inspector did call, what happened in that snip of observed lesson time could hugely affect a teacher’s reputation among colleagues and management. Most alarming of all, as I look back, was how the pupils’ learning was in fact curtailed during inspection week. Listen, for instance, to some of the Ofsted inspection advice I got in my first year:
- Always plan a lesson you’ve taught before.
- When the inspector walks in, immediately pause the lesson and get pupils to recite the learning objectives and then demonstrate prior learning.
- Ask management to strategically remove disruptive pupils from certain observation lessons.
That makes for depressing reading, I know- and there are more issues to unpack there than this post (or even this blog!) has scope for.
So why do I begin with this?
Because it came to mind this week as I thought about the absolutely crucial difference between a pupil’s learning and their performance. In the lessons I re-fried and served to the Ofsted inspector, most pupils on the surface performed pretty well. But how much learning went on?
Think about some of your pupils who relish the weekly vocab test: a guaranteed good mark once in the week, perhaps. Do these marks correspond with their sentence- or passage-translation? What about their grammar work, manipulating stems and endings? And how well have they retained week 1’s vocab by week 5, say?
“That’s because they crammed!”
Yes, likely. And can we do anything about it?
Yes. We can make the vocab test- as one example of a typical Latin assessment- a vehicle for learning rather than a mere vehicle for performance.
Where I work, pupils are obsessed with tests. Lots of them self-identify as smart, bright, talented etc. (and are told it too often), so their ears actually prick up at the t-word, and some probably lick their lips. But as I always tell them , ‘test’ is just another name for a piece of work. What I don’t tell them- and this is really interesting for us- is that research has shown that repeated testing opportunities produces better knowledge recall long term than repeated studying opportunities (which are more effective in the short term only).
Now where I work, Classics teachers of yore would have rolled their eyes at the very notion of professionally researched pedagogy. But they absolutely knew the value- and the potential– of a rigorous vocab test.
Consider the three boxes below. I used these last year with my Year 11 class to test the ‘C’ section of the GCSE vocab list. What is each one testing?
What about the boxes below? These were used for testing the entire list.
Is this sort of vocab test only appropriate for revision, for re-working familiar material?
Perhaps- and I’d love to hear your views on that. Nevertheless it seems clear to me that when vocab tests are seen as performance opportunities primarily, you run a few risks:
- The test is more a passive than an active process
- Vocab-recall is divorced from other skills and knowledge
- Cynical cramming is rewarded
To this I would add the ‘meta-cognitive’ benefit of tests which have been designed as learning events: unlike simple study (e.g. looking at the vocab on a page), tests help pupils more easily to identify and recognise whether info has or has not been understood/ stored.
Granted, meta-cognition is a word that does make you wince on first hearing. But what it basically means is being aware of yourself as a learner: what you have learnt, what you’re struggling with, why, how might your learning needs be better met etc. Is it a concept we should explicitly address, in your view?
Look at these research findings published in The Economist in 2016…
What do you think?
Please post thoughts below.
I hope I have highlighted some ways in which the humble vocab test can be an opportunity for pupils to learn. In essence: categorise/ confuse/ manipulate the words in order to create the sort of desirable difficulties that help pupils lock their knowledge in deep storage- as opposed to the surface ‘retrieval zone’.
Lastly, if you’d like to have a go at blogging on the topic of vocab learning, meta-cognition, or anything else on The Economist’s cost-effectiveness ledger, then drop us a line at quinquenniumblog@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you!
