Yes, it’s true, using the exam results that students achieve as a measure of the abilities or qualities of students and teachers, is impossible and a complete contradiction. It amazes me that anybody still thinks you can.
As Graham Nutthall points out in his intriguing summary of his life’s worth of studies called ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners’ (thanks to @MrDMJWalsh for the tip-off), you can’t do it.
Let me explain why:
Measuring teachers through results.
If good results mean the teachers are good, then universities, parents or anyone else can’t use exam results as a measure of the students’ abilities, as it wasn’t their abilities that led to the good results. It was the result of the good teachers they were lucky enough to have.
Measuring students through results.
If good exam results are as a result of the students being good, then they can’t be used to measure teachers by, as it is a reflection of the students they were lucky enough to be teaching. Not their own teaching ability that led to the favourable results.
Of course, I can’t imagine that anybody would argue that results are solely down to just the teachers, or just the students. But the performance of one group affects the results the other is measured on. This performance is a factor that is largely, or completely, out of their control. As I said, it amazes me. It is madness.
Even so, every education system I’ve ever comes into contact with does it. Remember, most assessments are incredibly narrow. Most measure academic ability or intelligences without exploring the other skills and attributes students may have been developing.
But if the focus of assessments is narrow, and the results of the assessments are high stakes enough, for the teacher and student there are huge temptations.
Stories of students trying to cheat have rarely been in short supply. But as Levitt and Dubner illustrate in ‘Freakonomics’, the pressure can get to teachers too. They managed to prove beyond doubt that some teachers had been cheating by changing students’ answers on test papers. They could do this by applying economic data analysis tools to discover unusual answering patterns on test papers. But, there are far more subtle ways that high stakes testing changes learning in schools. And they may even be more damaging.
‘Teaching to the test’ becomes irresistible as more and more pressure is piled on to get results. This must surely be to the detriment of the wider learning of the students?
Weekend exam revision sessions and extra tutoring in the evenings crams students’ heads with stuff to be vomited up through their pen onto test papers, before being quickly forgotten. And what life experiences are the students missing out on while doing all this extra exam preparation? What is the measure of the impact of not doing their sports, socialising, sleeping enough or relaxing? Nobody seems to care.
So it is time to accept that you can’t measure students and teachers on results. I think you can’t measure people’s abilities on something they don’t have control over, it’s nonesense. And placing huge pressure by making them high stakes is detrimental to students and teachers. Time to find something different.
Any ideas?
