Teaching to the test by Isobella Baggaley

‘This teach to test culture is part of schooling life and reduces our learning to exam preparation.’

TEACHING TO THE TEST

ISOBELLA BAGGALEY says education needs a wider perspective than a sharp end focused entirely on exams.

When I imagine my dream class, I think about snuggly seats in a circle, not desks lined up monotonously, facing the front of the room.

I see a teacher sitting with the students in the ring, posing them a question. ‘What makes a human right?’ she asks, and discussion erupts instantaneously. After an enthusiastic and active conversation on the question, the exchange dies down. During this time, the teacher has remained relatively quiet, other than chiming in with the odd suggestion or clarification. Yet, she now provides a new point, something that stimulates the exchange once again.

Students build off what they have learnt in other classes, relating the current discussion to other topics.

The mood is relaxed, and the collaborative and inquisitive conversations continue as class finishes and the students file out of the room.

My dream class is a space for open debates and the free exchange of ideas. My dream class is what it is. A dream.

The sad fact is the majority of lessons students today take are determined by a different goal – ‘teaching to the test’.

‘Teaching to the test’ is when a teacher teaches solely what is going to be found on the exam and avoids teaching information that is not going to be in the exam.

For example, if students were to be tested on fractions, instead of covering a range of knowledge and skills related to the topic so that the students understand what fractions are and how to manipulate them mathematically, a teacher who ‘teaches to the test’ will narrow down their instructions – teaching only around questions likely to be found on the exam.

This may not seem like it is such a major problem, but as time progresses and examinations and standardised tests become more relied on, it is becoming more common and happens more often than we think.

School has become centered on learning the content to pass an exam, and not about learning important skills. We prioritise our grades over actually learning useful life lessons, and the possibility of achieving low on an exam discourages students from pursuing alternative forms of education and new information.

Many schools will argue this is not true and that they are working towards raising ‘future leaders’, however, most of the school day is centered on teaching the standardised syllabus and optimising exam results. We are given ‘learning outcomes’ for the lesson, much of which is taken directly from the exam syllabus, along with practice questions and notes in order to spend our time learning how to answer the question perfectly to please the exam marker. We learn exactly what to do to keep the marker happy, instead of learning how to branch out and take risks.

Teachers who ‘teach to the test’ avoid topics that are not on the exam, deciding the subject is not worth covering, as it will not matter to us. However, exams only sample key elements of a topic and not the mass of knowledge that comes with it.

Exams tend to be viewed as the final point, and more of an isolated event. They are obstacles, something to overcome, rather than something that enhances our learning and understanding of a topic.

Students focus more on remembering mass amounts of information for the short term, cramming it into their head to last them until the exam, and then forgetting everything. Instead of working on remembering information for the long term, students just focus on remembering enough to pass the exam. This leads to all the data that schools, governments and the producers of these exams have been an inaccurate representation of a child’s learning, as, if you gave the children an exam on the same information a year later, the likelihood is that they will perform far worse, for they have forgotten everything they have learnt.

Most of our curriculum is based on learning ‘what we need to know’ to succeed in the upcoming examination, and not open-ended discussion and inquiry. Our learning is driven by a fear of failure, not personal interest and curiosity. This is due to society’s basis of a person’s worth on how many Excellences, Merits, Achieveds’ and Not Achieveds’ they have received.

This obsession to achieve, from both teachers and students, is a large barrier to our learning and our ability to retain knowledge going forward. It leaves little room for schools to focus on anything other than what they deem worthy to be examined on, most of which is something that will either not be useful to us or remembered by us, later in life.

This culture is now an everyday part of schooling life, and this approach reduces our learning to simply test preparation. Many of those behind this curriculum structure may argue that these methods prepare us students for university and the life ahead of us.

This is untrue, as it leaves students unable to adequately prepare for study at university. In short, mass fabricating us into exam whizzes will only lead us to crumble under any given pressure or challenge, as we struggle with being able to think for ourselves without guidance on how to perfectly answer correctly.

‘Teaching to the test’ is not the way we should be learning. Schools need to realise that, while exam scores are often viewed as a reflection of their quality, they are not simply vendors who give out the information required to pass a test, but instead a space where students can develop their abilities to inquire, investigate and explore the meaning of what they learn.