National testing causes a furore and never more so than England's 2016 national tests for 7 and 11 year olds. See what Professor Kathy Rastle says about testing here:
A guest post from Kathy Rastle (@Kathy_Rastle), Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Head of Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London.
We are now well into the summer term, and are faced with the usual arguments over the appropriateness of standard assessment tests (SATs) in the primary years. We’ve heard that schools are turning into exam factories, administering tests that reduce six- and seven-year olds to crying, anxious insomniacs. We’ve even had a kids’ strike to protest the Year 2 SATs.
Wherever one sits on the issue of SATs in primary school, most people concede that testing has some role to play in the assessment of children’s learning. But is testing simply a means by which we measure learning that has been achieved, or is it possible that testing plays a role in the learning itself? Research over the past decade argues definitively for the latter.
Hmmm. It's a long, long way between the "testing effect" and "SAT testing." Check out Wikipedia--as well as the research Rastle cites: The testing effect is the finding that long-term memory is increased when some of the learning period is devoted to retrieving the to-be-remembered information through testing with proper feedback. The effect is also sometimes referred to as retrieval practice, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning.
With SATs, there is no indication of what the "to-be remembered" information was ever taught, let alone "learned", and there is certainly no "proper feedback" involved.
The body of laboratory research is relevant to "instruction," not to "testing" in schooling.
