A little while ago, I caught myself feeling a bit smug.
For the first time in ages, I didn’t teach a Year 11 group. That meant I didn’t have any mock exam papers to mark.
And that meant I was able to stand back and watch colleagues burdened by a huge weight of scripts that they will have to plough through and mark with at least a semblance of objectivity.
Of course, much of that marking was tedious and repetitive. It didn’t require huge skill or discernment on the part of the marker. It did require stamina, patience and a ready supply of Kitkats.
I have no sympathy! But it gave me a chance to think about the influence technology is beginning to have on the way we test pupils’ knowledge.
Since we moved, as a school, to Google Classroom we’ve been experimenting with ways to use Google Forms effectively. We use them for all sorts of things but it’s the ease with which we can set quizzes and tests that interests me particularly.
Maybe it’s having the computer mark the tests that really interests me?
Whatever... I have come to re-think my opinion of multiple-choice tests - and all the variations on that theme.
I used to be rather dismissive of them. I didn’t really think they had a place in my subjects, English and Theatre. I could see how they could be useful in Chemistry but English and Theatre are all about writing carefully crafted essays, right?
Well, yes and no.
Essay writing will always be an essential skill in English but there is also a bulk of necessary knowledge and the essay isn’t necessarily the best way of testing that knowledge. Or, it isn’t the only way.
I’ve learnt a lot from a colleague who teaches Sports Science. He’s very bright but a bit lazy; lazy in a way only very good sportsmen and women are. It’s a laziness driven by a desire to divert energy only to those areas where they can spot a potential competitive advantage.
And he can see the potential in Google Forms. He uses them really well to test his students’ knowledge. And the more he uses them, the more effective and imaginative his quizzes become.
His latest is a variation of the ‘bleep test’. You’ve probably seen a bleep test in action. You might be unlucky enough to have had to do one. The idea is that you run repeatedly between two lines, with a decreasing amount of time allowed for each run, the time marked by ‘bleeps’. If you haven’t made the line by the time of the bleep you have to drop out, usually in a sweating, gasping heap.
His quizzes take that form. The questions navigate a body of knowledge, getting progressively more difficult and, if you get a question wrong, you drop out. It gives a snapshot of the level of knowledge you have achieved.
His students love them. At least, they love them more than the real bleep tests they also have to do.
I’ve come to realise that multiple choice questions, when skilfully set, can be used to test much higher order skills than I had previously acknowledged.
The key words there, of course, are ‘skilfully set’. The effectiveness of the quiz is entirely dependent on the plausibility of the distractors (the ‘wrong’ answers).
Writing such tests takes time and experience. It’s something we should actively talk about as teachers and learn from people who do it well. We should spend INSET time developing those skills.
We should do it because then we would get a ready supply of objective, reliable diagnostic evidence to use in our planning. If you have to mark all the papers first, chances are you’ll have lost the will to live by the time it comes to any useful analysis of the results.
Let the technology do the heavy-lifting. Then we can concentrate on the difficult parts of teaching, like working out precisely how to take each student on to the next level.
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