Rethinking tests: From evaluation to insight

We were discussing the onboarding program for a couple of new hires. One of my team suggested that we have some mechanism to test their progress week-on-week. But then he said something really strange, which got me thinking. He said that the test was less about evaluating the new hires and more about identifying areas to focus on in the remainder of the training. 

This was a refreshing insight on what role tests play in training and education. Today, we administer tests to our kids as part of the education system. However, we read only half the story that the test results are telling us. In the current approach, there is an assumption that the trainer did their job well and that the fault for not answering the questions correctly lies completely with the learner. But what if we approached it from a different angle? 

Let’s take an example. Say the teacher has taught a lesson with three sections in it to a class of 30 learners. At the end of the lesson, the class is administered a test. Each student receives their marks to show them how much of the lesson they understood. The teacher also receives a report that analyses which students learned what part of the lesson best. This allows the trainer to take remedial action and focus on specific sets of students based on what they didn’t understand. This might mean breaking the class into smaller subsets to focus on what that set of students need. Each batch of students is different and the report will help the teacher focus on what is needed to help the current batch be successful. 

Through all my years of being a student and then a further 12 years experiencing education from my children’s POV, I don’t believe such an approach has been tried. This is not just robbing the children of the opportunity to learn better but we rob the teachers of valuable insights on their current batch of students. 

A constant bone of contention from parents is that the teachers only focus on the top five or ten percent of the class, while ignoring the rest. This is not surprising given the incentives the teachers are set. But, to be fair to them, they are lacking crucial information that lets them identify what exactly the students that are lagging behind require. Even the remedial classes just repeat what was done earlier without trying to understand what specific part of the lesson was hard for the, so called, backward students. 

I’d love to hear from anyone who knows of an education system that address this lacuna in the system that is commonly followed today.