Why You SHOULD Teach To The Test
A recent Center for Digital Education headline was proclaiming that paper beat online testing. Attention seeker? Absolutely! After all, how can one decide from one experience, without having all the facts, that something traditional, consistently done and perfected over decades, bested something new and unknown, which had little, if any, preparation or practice? Besides, in this digital world where we are building our children into future innovators and workforce, is there a truly viable option to keep away from digital? How many among us still write checks at the store, to give one example; I for one only wrote about 10 in my whole life, and can vouch for my last one being over 10 years ago. Today even simple jobs at McDonalds and Walmart involve touch screens, not to mention that even online voting is catching up with the times. In this day and age, as we are equipping our students to invent 22nd century lives, how do we prepare them to strive online? If we look closely, the above mentioned digital matter comes down to the same issues that meet every sudden change: poor change management, which creates distrust and aversion, which lead to mishaps like these, which then gets everything crossed out and labeled as “bad ideas”. Digital change in itself is a lively conversation, which I’m planning to open to you for debate in the coming weeks; today, I’m only trying to sell you an old statement in a new form: why you should teach to the test, and help your students demonstrate the best of their knowledge. Here are five things to help you ponder. EVERYBODY CAN WALK
But not everyone can run track. Running track is not just putting one foot in front of the other; it requires building athletic and mental endurance over a period of time and learning how to manage your body to meet your goals. It is also important to have a coach that can teach you strategies that optimize your efforts to become a runner, AND help you get there faster. They teach you things like controlling your breathing, pacing yourself, focusing your energy through a particularly challenging stretch, sprinting, and keeping your eye on the finish line. Same goes for guiding our students through taking a test online, building their stamina and concentration, and practicing with them so they are comfortable with the process. They are great on social media, but using an online testing platform isn’t quite as intuitive. IT’S ALL IN THE WRIST
All tests involve writing, but not all writing involves handwriting. Just like writing fluency is vital to successful test taking, so is typing fluency mandatory to a good test-taking experience. We make our students practice writing so they can build fluency, speed, thought coherence and correct spelling skills. The same should be true for digital writing: at the least, we should help our students find the key placement and shortcuts so that they don’t have to "chicken type" during test, to the detriment of their coherence and speed. After all, if they can think fast and fluid with a pen in hand, it is doubtful that they would lose the mental capacity to do the same in front of a computer, should they have enough practice with it.
EAGLE EYE Reading a passage in a paper test is quite different than its online version. Marianne Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, that we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading; we build them, and use our imagination to project the reading in 3D representations of our own making; this seems easier to do on a physical copy of a passage than on an e-copy, when our brains are not consistently trained to read certain types of materials online. We consider our students masters of their realm - read social media again - but does emoticon rich, online shorthand without punctuation help them comprehend the meaning of a paragraph? Training our students to master digital reading comprehension is similar to its paper counterpart, but the strategies may differ, and the highlighter may be handier (not to mention that some devices allow you to double-tap define a word rather than having to go to the thesaurus). Reading strategies, paper or digital, help your students be successful in every situation. NOT ALL TESTING IS CREATED EQUAL Some is Math, some is Social Studies, some has equations, some punctuation, and some involves a calculator. They all happen in the same space, but the features live in different tabs. The same is true of testing device: give a tablet user a desktop and watch them perform the same simple task, open a browser, find the test tools, or even type upper and lower case. It is important to get your students familiar with the toolbox available to them on the platform, on the device they will use during testing. Remember that a lockdown browser will disable access to other device features, so it is vital for students to know their way around the platform and tools they need. TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES In the digital age we depend on a number of luxuries: continuous connectivity, enough bandwidth, our network filters that are meant to protect us, even electricity, believe it or not. Preparing for an online test shouldn't start the week before the test, and the planning should involve the campus leadership team, as well as the testing platform and district's technology teams. A thorough understanding of technical needs and capabilities of, both, local circumstances (device readiness, hardware, bandwidth, security filters, etc), and platform particulars can be achieved when all the players are at the table, and all the questions, from everyone’s point of view (including the students’) are asked.
Of course, technology can fail (lights go out every day, what do we do then?), but proper planning, with all the variables taken into account, will ensure that the students receive an optimal online testing experience. Of course, plans B, C, and all the way to Z (read paper option) should be in place; and, of course, for formative e-assessments your students should know minor troubleshooting like switching browsers, or remedy the issues that they created by, oh, say, downloading a vpn or a Google extension that interferes with the testing platform. At the end of the day, a successful testing experience has as much to do with mastering the process, as with mastering the content. Paper or online, assiduous preparation, alongside thorough teaching and learning are key to success. Thinking of online testing? You should! And you should think to teach your students how to master all the aspects of testing.