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YOU’D PROBABLY FIND IT DIFFICULT TO LOCATE ANYONE, TEACHER OR NON-

teacher, who doesn’t recognize that there’s some sort of a relationship

between teaching and testing. Just about everyone realizes that if a

teacher does a great instructional job, that teacher’s students will usu-

ally perform better on tests. It’s the other side of the equation that’s

less often understood, namely, that how a teacher tests— the way a

teacher designs tests and applies test data—can profoundly affect how

well that teacher teaches.

The connection between one’s teaching and one’s testing is a crit-

ical one that, if properly understood, can lead to a substantial increase

in instructional effectiveness. I want you not only to accept the idea

that testing can help teaching, but also to act on that idea. I want you

to pick up tangible instructional payoffs from linking your tests to

your teaching. You’ll teach better, and your students will learn more.

You’ll be a better teacher, and I’ll be a happy author. Let’s get started.

What’s in a Name? I need to define some terms as we get under way. First, what is a test

or, more specifically, what is an educational test? Simply put, an edu-

cational test is a formal attempt to determine a student’s status with

1 The Links

Between Testing and Teaching

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Popham, W. James. Test Better, Teach Better : The Instructional Role of Assessment, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/amridge/detail.action?docID=5704436. Created from amridge on 2022-01-13 03:16:11.

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T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R2

respect to specific variables, such as the student’s knowledge, skills,

and attitudes. The adjective “formal” in the previous sentence is

important, because it distinguishes a test from the many casual judg-

ments that teachers routinely make about their students. For exam-

ple, during my first year of teaching (in a small eastern Oregon high

school), I had a student named Mary Ruth Green. I could almost

always tell (or so I thought) how well Mary Ruth had mastered the

previous night’s English homework assignment. When it came time

to discuss the homework topic, if Mary Ruth was animated and eager

to contribute, I concluded that she knew the assigned stuff. If she sat

silently and avoided eye contact with me, however, I guessed that she

and the previous night’s homework topic were unacquainted.

I made all sorts of on-the-spot judgments about what Mary Ruth

and my other students knew, but those judgments were informal

ones and often based on pretty skimpy observational data. In con-

trast, a test entails a systematic effort to get a fix on a student’s status

with respect to such things as the student’s ability to perform an

intellectual skill—to compose a job-application letter, for instance, or

to carry out an hypothesis-testing experiment in a chemistry class.

For many people, the word test conjures up images of traditional,

paper-and-pencil forms (multiple-choice exams or True-False

quizzes). Perhaps this explains why a growing number of educators

prefer to use the term assessment, which seems to embrace both tra-

ditional forms of testing and comparatively recent ones like looking

for evidence of learning by examining student-generated work port-

folios or group reports of experimental projects. Still, as long as you

don’t restrict yourself to only traditional testing approaches, the

terms test and assessment are really interchangeable. And while we’re

swimming in this particular synonym pool, let me toss in two more:

the slightly technical-sounding measurement and the serious-sound-

ing examination (or exam). Each of these four terms describes a formal

attempt to determine a student’s status with respect to an education-

ally relevant variable. In this book, you’ll find that I use all four

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T h e L i n k s B e t w e e n T e s t i n g a n d T e a c h i n g 3

interchangeably, not for any subtle reasons, but just because I get

tired of using the same word all the time.

Why We Test Human beings are tough to figure out. Ask any psychiatrist. Ask your-

self. And young human beings in grades K–12 are no exception. To

illustrate, if a teacher wants to determine what Ted’s ability to read is,

the teacher won’t find that information tattooed on Ted’s arm. Ted’s

reading ability is covert. The teacher must figure out how to uncover

that hidden ability. So the teacher whips up a 15-item reading test

calling for Ted to read several short passages and then answer a series

of questions getting at (1) the central messages in the passages and

(2) certain key details in those passages. Ted takes the test and does a

great job, answering each of the 15 items correctly. The teacher then

makes an inference about Ted’s covert reading ability based on Ted’s

overt performance on the 15-item test.

If you think about it, just about every worthwhile thing that edu-

cators try to promote is unseeable. Consider spelling ability as another

example. A child’s spelling ability cannot be seen, only inferred. What

goes through the teacher’s head is something like this:

Martha did well on this month’s spelling test. She wrote out

“from scratch” the correct spellings for 18 of 20 words I read out

loud. It is reasonable for me to infer, then, that Martha possesses

a really high level of spelling ability—a level of ability that would

display itself in a fairly similar fashion if Martha were asked to take

other, similar 20-item spelling tests.

Remember, what the teacher sees when Martha spells the word

“awry” properly is only Martha’s spelling of “awry” and not Martha’s

spelling ability. The teacher needs to infer the level of Martha’s

spelling skill by seeing how well Martha does on her spelling tests.

The more spelling tests that Martha takes, the more confidence the

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T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R4

teacher can have in any inferences about Martha’s spelling skill. An

inference about a student can be based on a single test; a more accu-

rate inference will be made if multiple tests are employed.

Likewise, a child’s ability to perform basic arithmetic skills is

unseeable; it’s something we infer from the child’s performance on an

exam (or, preferably, more than one exam) dealing with adding,

subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Children’s confidence in

being able to present an oral report to their classmates is certainly

unseeable, but again, we can infer it from students’ responses to an

assessment instrument constructed specifically to measure such

things. (You’ll learn more about that sort of noncognitive assessment

in Chapter 8.)

So educational measurement is, at bottom, an inference-making

enterprise in which we formally collect overt, test-based evidence from

students to arrive at what we hope are accurate inferences about stu-

dents’ status with respect to covert, educationally important vari-

ables: reading ability, knowledge of history, ability to solve simulta-

neous equations, interest in social studies, and so on. The process is

represented in Figure 1.1.

1 . 1 EDUCATIONAL TESTING AS AN INFERENCE-MAKING PROCESS

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Yes, as my experience with Mary Ruth and her homework

showed, it is certainly possible for a teacher to make an inference

about students based on informal, nontest evidence. Suppose your

student Alvin gives you a note in which he had misspelled several

words. Based on this evidence, you might infer that Alvin’s spelling

ability isn’t all that wonderful. However, a formal assessment of

Alvin’s spelling skill, one based on a larger and more age-appropriate

set of words, would increase the likelihood of your making an accu-

rate inference about Alvin’s spelling ability.

The accuracy of these inferences is critical, because a teacher’s

understanding of students’ knowledge, abilities, and attitudes should

form the basis for the teacher’s instructional decisions. And, of

course, the more accurate the test-based inferences a teacher makes,

the more defensible will be the teacher’s instructional decisions based

on those inferences.

What Sorts of Teaching Decisions Can Tests Help? I’ve been touting the tight relationship that should be present

between testing and teaching. It’s time to get more specific. There are

four types of teaching decisions that should rest squarely on what a

teacher finds out either from the structure of the educational tests

themselves or from the way students perform on educational tests.

Decisions about the nature and purpose of the curriculum. Essentially,

the teacher seeks answers to questions like these: “What am I really

trying to teach? What do my students need to know and be able to

do? How can I translate the big curricular goals set for my students

into specific, teachable components?”

Decisions about students’ prior knowledge. Questions include, “ What

do my students already know about the topic I’m planning to teach?

Are there any gaps that I need to address before we can tackle this

material? Based on what my students know and can do, how can I tai-

lor my instruction to provide the proper balance of remediation and

challenge?”

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T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R6

Decisions about how long to teach something. Questions include,

“How long do I think it will take my students to master this content?

What kind of progress are they making? Are we on the right track?

Should I continue teaching on my planned schedule, or are we ready

to move on?”

Decisions about the effectiveness of instruction. Questions include,

“Did my students learn? Was the instructional approach I took a good

one? What specific activities were the most advantageous? Where do

I need to make alterations?”

Now, let’s take a closer look at how tests—both their design and the

results of their application—can help teachers make these kinds of

decisions with confidence.

Using Tests to Clarify the Curriculum Typically, educators think of a curriculum as the set of intended out-

comes that we want students to achieve. During the bulk of my

teaching career, most teachers have used the phrase educational objec-

tives to describe their curricular intentions. These days, of course, we

find that most curricula are described as sets of content standards—

that is, the knowledge and skills students are supposed to master as a

consequence of instruction. Sometimes we see the term benchmarks

used to describe the more specific skills and knowledge often sub-

sumed beneath fairly broad content standards. The descriptors may

change, but the mission of a curriculum remains constant: Its essen-

tial purpose is to lay out the stuff we want kids to learn.

Regardless of whether we call them content standards, goals, or

objectives, the curricular intentions handed down by states and dis-

tricts are often less clear than teachers need them to be for purposes

of day-to-day instructional planning. For example, a group of ele-

mentary teachers might find themselves responsible for promoting

this district-approved social studies content standard: “Students will

comprehend the formal and informal nature of the interrelationships

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among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of U.S.

government.”

Let’s imagine you’re one of the 5th grade teachers who is supposed

to help students master this content standard. How would you go

about planning your instruction? Personally, I think there’s way too

much fuzz on this curricular peach. Different teachers could easily

read this social studies content standard and come up with quite diver-

gent ideas of what it signifies. For example, one teacher might con-

clude that this content standard focuses exclusively on the formal and

informal “checks and balances” when one governmental branch inter-

acts with the other two. Another teacher might think that this content

standard emphasizes the distinction between “formal” and “informal”

interrelationships among the three governmental branches.

Now suppose that your 5th graders will be taking an important

“standards-based” social studies achievement test at the end of the

school year. If the people who built that test interpret this social stud-

ies content standard in one way, and you interpret it in another

way—and teach toward your interpretation—it’s almost certain that

your students won’t do as well on the achievement test as you, your

principal, or your students’ parents would like.

Clearly, if the curricular aims that a teacher must address are open

to multiple interpretations, then off-the-mark instruction is likely to

occur, bringing with it lower test performances. But if a curricular

goal is accompanied by a set of illustrative test items indicating the

ways that the goal will be measured, then teachers can analyze those

items and form a far more accurate idea of the outcome that the state

or district is actually seeking. Because the sample test items exem-

plify what the curricular intention really represents, teachers can plan

and provide their students with better, more curricularly relevant

instruction.

To illustrate, suppose you knew that mastery of the fairly fuzzy

5th grade social studies goal about the three branches of the U.S. gov-

ernment would be assessed by items similar to the following:

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T E S T B E T T E R , T E A C H B E T T E R8

SAMPLE ITEM 1

Which of the following three branches of U.S. government, if

any, is primarily responsible for the final enactment of treaties

with foreign nations?

a. Legislative c. Judicial

b. Executive d. No single branch is responsible.

SAMPLE ITEM 2

Which, if any, of the following statements about governmental

stability is true? (Mark each statement as True or False.)

a. The enactment of term-limiting legislation at the local level

has made the U.S. federal legislative branch of government

more stable.

b. The availability of the impeachment process tends to decrease

the stability of the executive branch of U.S. government.

c. Historically, the judicial branch of U.S. federal government

has been the most stable.

SAMPLE ITEM 3

Our founding fathers charted a meaningful series of govern-

mental checks and balances. Focus on the area of taxation,

then select two of the three branches and briefly describe the

formal way(s) in which one branch can check the other. Answer

in the space provided below.

Having read these sample items, wouldn’t you have a much better

idea of what to teach your students in order for them to come to

“comprehend the formal and informal nature of the interrelationships

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among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of U.S. govern-

ment”? Sample Item 1 makes it clear that students will need to learn

the primary responsibilities of each governmental branch. Sample

Item 2 suggests that students must learn why important factors such

as governmental stability are present for each branch. And Sample

Item 3 indicates that, as the content standard said, students will need

to understand the “formal and informal nature of the relationships”

among the governmental branches. For this item, as you can see, the

focus is on formal. In another item, you can reasonably assume, the

focus might be on informal. Moreover, Sample Item 3 tips you off that

students may need to display this understanding by constructing

their own responses, rather than merely selecting a response from a

set of options.

I believe that elementary teachers who consider these three illustra-

tive items along with the original statement of the content standard are

going to have a far more lucid idea of what the content standard actu-

ally means. Consequently, they’ll be able to deliver instruction that is