Throughout all of our schooling careers, I am certain that everyone has been extremely stressed while writing a test in an allotted amount of time. I, like many others, have accepted the fact that this was just necessary to facilitate learning. I was thinking about this concept as I was thinking about writing a blog and I came to a very startling realisation. Does writing a test and cramming information into our heads really relate to the real world? I pose this question to anyone who reads this: When in real life will we ever have to finish a project for work, write an entire paper, or do any other activity inside the span of an hour or two as we do on the tests that we write? This way of instructing does not make any sense to me now that I have been enrolled in this class for a few weeks.
Now don’t get me wrong. I can see the effectiveness of repetitive actions when it comes to learning but I do not feel that it effective to force people to sit through a test that is going to stress them out and put them in a negative state of mind if they are completely blanking on a question. Everyone has been writing a test and they do not know an answer for a question. This point is strengthened by an article I was reading brought up the idea of a student being out of it or not in the proper form on the day of the exam. This is understandably stressful especially if the question is worth a lot marks. I pose another question: When in real life will we not be allowed to have access to resources and have to rely on memory alone?
I feel like a better way to facilitate learning would be assignments that do not require someone to be without resources and have a near impossible to reach time limit for some people. Are there any other ways that you could think of or any studies that you could find that could replace testing in our schools?
Here is a link to the article that I mentioned earlier.
http://www.scmp.com/article/716566/are-exams-more-effective-tool-assess-students-coursework
Life Long Learning: Evidence Based Education 
Wow, really enjoyed reading your blog post. You’ve brought up a topic that I have thought about many a time before. We are asked to wrote essays in addition to multiple choice questions and/or short answer questions in an hour or two. If you cannot complete the test, or you complete it but not very well, then your intelligence is questioned. Do you really know the material? Why couldn’t you finish in the time allotted? A job would never ask you to do a half complete job just so you could get it done in an hour, So you’re right, it does not really relate to real life at all.
I found this study where 26 graduate students did timed, and untimed tests. They also measured the relation of anxiety with timed or untimed tests. I found it interesting that both high-test-anxiety students and low-test-anxiety students did better on the same statistics test when it was untimed. Its suggested that timed tests are invalid representations of the students knowledge of the material. In fact there was a full letter grade difference between high-level-anxiety students in the timed test (lower letter grade) when compared to high-level-anxiety students grades in the untimed test.
I had always thought about this but never looked for research to back up my opinion that timed tests are not an accurate way of finding out what the students full knowledge in the course is. Great blog post, really made me think about the tests we take in university.
Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Seaman, M. A. (1995). The effect of time constraints and statistics test anxiety on test performance in a statistics course. The Journal of experimental education, 63(2), 115-124.
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Hi Koleton!
I definitely agree with your opinions on your post. I feel as though intelligence is also having the ability to know where to find and access knowledge, in order to learn more and benefit from it. And you’re right—we will be able to have that access in our occupations after school. I can see why exams are important here, because they are a way to assess the student body of how they are taking in the information and to assess how they are learning everything so far. But I think this notion has been trumped by the standardization of exams as a way to give rewards for memorization.
I found a website that compares traditional assessment measures for students with authentic ones. The traditional ones are what we have in place in post-secondary (multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, etc.), which see students as productive citizens when they possess a certain body of knowledge and skills (Mueller, 2014). So in order to assess those skills and that knowledge base, students need to be tested to see if they have acquired those skills (Mueller, 2014). For authentic assessment, they also have the goal of producing productive citizens, but the assessment bases itself on trying to help students perform tasks that are meaningful to the real world (Mueller, 2014). They then are assessed on how well they can perform those. I feel like if we moved more toward an authentic assessment of knowledge in University, we would benefit better because we would be able to assess all kinds of knowledge and skills…ones that are useful to us in our lives after school.
Mueller, J. (2014). What is Authentic Assessment. Retrieved from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm#traditional
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I agree with the idea that we should definitely move to more real life application outside of a classroom for learning. This is where we will apply all of our knowledge outside of the schooling environment so this makes sense. But i question the idea that these exams are actually addressing how students are taking in information in these short amounts of time in lectures for tests. I find personally that I do not have the capabilities to recall information when i am pressured to do so and stressed out during an exam. So i pose the question if these tests are actually just testing how much students can memorize before the exam? Memorization a day or two before the exam and forgetting everything after does not constitute learning in my eyes. I feel assignments are a way better way of learning because the students are less stressed and they can learn these life skills of acquiring knowledge and applying it to a real life scenario.
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NM: I totally agree with you here. I feel like with written assignments, presentations, and other kinds of projects really show what a student is capable of, because so many more cognitive mechanisms other than memorization are being utilized here. Which goes to show how much a student is learning and how their skills are being utilized. And for your question, I actually don’t know! I feel like they are though, which I agree with you that this doesn’t constitute learning one bit. I think it just adds to the stress of school if one can’t memorize well. For most of my 1000/2000 level courses I had mostly exams, and I remember doing so bad and I tried to memorize as much as I could but it just wasn’t working well for me. So now being in higher level classes, and having less exams for them, I find that I am doing better. Which I’m like yay!
And I feel like assignments teach you skills like organization, writing, formulation, public speaking, etc. which I think are pretty useful!
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Interesting blog! I definitely agree that rushed tests are way more difficult to complete well than a test taken with an unlimited amount of time. I personally believe that this also closely relates to test anxiety. A study in Contemporary Educational Psychology showed that the more anxious students were during/before writing an exam, the more poorly they would perform. These students also generally performed at lower levels on aptitude tests. I think that creating anxiety by putting time pressures on tests is counterproductive as it no longer shows how capable the students are of learning, but rather how quickly they can buzz through an exam and/or how well they can manage their anxiety.
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I think it is interesting blog to talk about. I agreed with your point that testing make students feel stress and anxiety. Testing is make instructor feel great, not students. When students in-tireless studied and core the test, instructor think they know how to teach. But, when students failed the test, instructor think students are stupid. When students do tests,they may failed it for luck of enough time to remember things they studied everywhere in the text book. Students may have no enough time to remember everything in an hours or less. I think, testing is not important, creativity is important in learning than testing. In my view, students would learn a lot in creativity courses than testing courses. Students would compete creating projects in their own world. I feel stress when i am study tests because i do not know how it is going to come; especially when instructors does not cooperate, for It is hard to finger it out where the test will comes in the course text book. Yes, education institutions should fine other “intellectual influence” (Delaney, 2004) to apply to a learning much better than testing.
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I think it is interesting blog to talk about. I agreed with your point that testing make students feel stress and anxiety. Testing make instructors feel great, not students. When students in-tireless studied and core the test, instructor think they know how to teach. But, when students failed the test, instructors think students are stupid. When students do tests,they may failed it for luck of enough time to remember things they studied everywhere in the text book. Students may have no enough time to remember everything in an hours or less. I think, testing is not important, creativity is important in learning than testing. In my view, students would learn a lot in creativity courses than testing courses. Students would compete creating projects in their own world. I feel stress when i am study tests because i do not know how it is going to come; especially when instructors do not cooperate, for It is hard to finger it out where the test will come in the course text book. Yes, education institutions should fine other to “intellectually influence” (Delaney, 2004) to apply learning much better than testing.
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This is a really interesting perspective! A question that actually came to my mind immediately was whether or not a student might score the same on the test if given a greater amount of time. Clearly, this depends on whether or not the student is able to finish the test in the allotted amount of time, but by adding the time constraint you do eliminate opportunities for students to “overthink” a question. Is this beneficial? I know I’ve definitely experienced a scenario in which I’ve second guessed myself on a test and gone back to change my answer, only to find out that I was correct the first time and would have received full marks had I stuck with my original answer. I’d be interested to see more research on the “gut-instinct” tactic that many students stick to on multiple choice-style tests, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a whole lot! However, I did find a very interesting study on this phenomenon in nurses, and whether or not their “gut instinct” in critical life-saving scenarios is more often correct than not. The results of that particular study were somewhat inconclusive, and didn’t really address the effectiveness of the phenomenon, but provided some cool insights into the technicalities of these “gut-instinct” decision making processes!
Blum et al. (2010). Using the Benner intuitive-humanistic decision-making model in action: A case study. Nurse Education in Practice. Vol. 10, issue 5. Pages 303-307.doi:10.1016/j.nepr.2010.01.009
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I agree with some of the points you made in this blog post, another thing to think about it all of the different individuals writing the test in the amount of time given to them, what about those students who get distracted very easily, so easily that even just the slightest sound being made in the area where the test is written, enables them to think clearly, which then has an effect on the out come of their grade on that test, or a student who get such bad test anxiety that when in the test they end up blanking out all of the information that they were suppose to remember. Every student can be effected in different ways, but I personally don’t find this fair. An article I came across talks about how there can be a different way to measure a child’s progress in their school work. The way they discussed is called a performance and portfolio assessment, which involves observing activity that was learned, an example the article gave was ” giving a speech or doing a science experiment in the case of a performance assessment or assembling a record of the actual day-to-day class work a child does in a portfolio assessment.” (Association of test publishers, 2016)
http://www.testpublishers.org/testing-in-schools
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I completely agree that the added stress of tests can have a negative effect on learning. Some individuals experience really bad testing anxiety.
On the one hand we have the testing effect, which says that testing with feedback can actual help motivation for learning. Unfortunately we often use testing styles that do not actually allow feedback. Multiple choice testing being the prime example. Not only do we use multiple choice testing, but we pair that with lecture classes, which Dr. Martin has even shown us is the least effective method for teaching and learning. Then on top of all the we make these tests 20-50% of our overall grade.
So really we have an environment that is not only stressful, but does not encouraging our learning.
We are setting students up for failure by putting high value on grades. Then we also set professors up for failure by giving them giant classrooms.
It seems to me our university is not really about learning, but rather a way for us to pay into research like Dr. Martin has suggested.
This Link : https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8JjlCAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA317&dq=test+anxiety+&ots=5RXnHwrn5R&sig=MARX-k67ZLnCS25rKLwn_tz4aDE#v=onepage&q=test%20anxiety&f=false
Shows a book that discusses text anxiety and its impact of student performance.
I think Dr. Martin might be right that having simple pass/fail classrooms might be more beneficial for education and learning. If we were to implicate this concept in schools we would have to start in elementary with the current generation. I believe us adults have been taught to want a grade and not to learn and changing our minds is going to be a lot harder than to shape a Childs mind.
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I agrees nothing adds more stress then anything then a multiple choice exam with 100 questions and a time limit of 60 min to finish, which is highly impossible i think, as students would tends to stress in this type of situation and with stress it turns into panic, where student would start to do the guessing game which if it was me i would start to pick C. With all that stress and panic happening in the moodle centre it makes me question, the validity of these rush exams, is there really much learning? or are we just jamming things into our brain, and hoping that it would be useful is that stressful 60 minutes. Therefore i think other methods of testing could be much more beneficial to our learning then the standard rushed multiple choice test; like the blogs and comments we are writing for each other.
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