Test – just don’t cram
Anastasia De Waal, 16 October 2009
The latest findings from the Cambridge Primary Review, published today, raise many interesting and important issues. Whilst the main media focus has been the proposition that the school starting age should be raised to 6, the Review’s line on testing is also significant.
Professor Alexander and his colleagues are calling for an end to the Key Stage 2 Sats, the tests taken by primary school leavers in Year 6. The authors rightly point to the reality that the Sats tests are narrowing the curriculum.
The point, however, is that it’s not testing which is the issue. It’s the distorted process. A chief reason that the main distortion in the process – cramming or ‘teaching to the test’ – is so rife is because it is being positively encouraged. Teachers are the last people who want to spend relentless hours, as un-stimulated as their pupils, trying to bolster Sats scores through repetition. But the combination of being told what will be in the tests and what to focus on and (ironically) that the ‘quality’ of the teaching is being evaluated almost solely on the basis of Sats scores, is compelling them to cram.
Clearly getting rid of cramming doesn’t necessitate getting rid of the tests – it necessitates getting rid of cramming. This does not require any radical shake-up within the system it straightforwardly requires an end to information about the specifics of what will be in the tests and the establishment of a situation where the Sats test a snapshot of what has been learnt in primary school – as opposed to the current scenario where pupils prepare specifically for that snapshot.
The Tories are proposing that the Key Stage 2 Sats tests are taken in the first year of secondary school in order to end teaching-to-the-test. Yet primary school accountability will continue to be wrapped up in the tests, wherever the setting. Therefore if primary teachers continue to be given the same level of information about what is in the tests, they will continue to teach to the test. The only difference is that time in secondary school will be wasted on Sats as well as in primary.
The Times newspaper recently published an english paper that a well known private seconday school gives to all its students on entering Year12/LowerVI. It’s very much an old fashioned test designed to assess ability, quite specifically, in spelling, punctuation and grammar. It is tough, but the sort of thing that would have been no problem for any average Lower VI student in, say, 1986.
Somthing similar is needed in Year 6 or start of Year 7 now. The sort of rigorous, objective test that it is well nigh impossible for the teacher to ‘cram’ his/her pupils for.
Knowledge, and its direct application, would be the only thing being statistically measured.
Many would come out in a cold sweat as a result; mostly teachers and parents!