An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati.
Welcome to this first ever blog post in the Back to Basics series: a collection of articles designed to get straight to the point and offer advice that you can implement in the classroom right away.
In today’s piece, I’ll be sharing my tips on how to set a summative test for your students. These tips are based on more than twenty years of secondary school teaching experience so pay attention: all of what I’m about to share was learned through painful, long and arduous trial-and-error.
Tip #1: Always Give Your Students a Topic List to Study From
If your students don’t know what’s going to come up on the test, then how can they study or revise for it? It seems like such simple advice, doesn’t it? Yet, too many teachers are telling students that “You have a test on what we’ve covered so far”, or that “I’ll give you a test on Unit 1”, without explicitly telling the children which sub-topics, or content areas, in “Unit X’ or ‘what we’ve covered so far’ will be tested.
The bottom line is that you must give your students a list of what they need to revise. This could be as simple as writing a list of topics on the whiteboard for them to copy into their books, or sharing the topic list on their VLE (e.g. Google Classroom, Firefly, Moodle, Managebac, and so on).
Pro tip (next level): Don’t simply share the official syllabus or specification with he students. Even older children need the course content broken down into ‘kid friendly’ language. Make the topic list understandable, and accessible.
Testing Tip #2: Give Your Students Advance Warning
Setting a test the next day, or the next lesson, simply isn’t fair. Don’t you remember when you were in school? Didn’t you need time to study for a test?
Give your students advance notice that a test is happening. The bigger the test, the more time for revision will be needed. Small, end of unit tests may only require a week of advance notice to be given to the students, for example. Larger tests, such as mid-terms, end-of-term, or end of year exams may require a month or more of advance warning. Have you shared the topic list in advance too? You need to!
Testing Tip #3: ALL Summative Assessments MUST Come With Official Answers
These ‘marking schemes’ could be pulled from past-exam papers (if you’re building a test from such questions), textbooks, online question banks, rubrics, or (if you’re struggling to find resources), even an official marking scheme you’ve written yourself.
They key thing to remember here is that your students will need to know where they’ve messed up when the exam is finished, and how they could have scored better. This can only happen if there is an official set of ‘model answers’ that can be given to the students once the test has been marked and feedback has been given.
Some teachers are scared of providing marking schemes in case the students find out that they’ve not been awarded a mark or two when they should have been. Please don’t worry: slightly inaccurate marking is something that all teachers make the mistake of doing from time-to-time. I’ve been teaching for more than twenty years and I still sometimes miss marks that should have been awarded. Having an official marking scheme is actually really good for this purpose: it keeps you and your students accountable, engaged in the learning process and invested in making progress.
Testing Tip #4: Feedback Must be Timely and Specific
You suddenly find yourself with stacks of exam papers to mark, a full timetable to teach and no time to get everything done. I get it. I’ve been there many times.
Somehow, however, you’ve got to get that feedback to the chidlren as soon as you can. Feedback that is delayed is less useful because students forget the details, lose context, or have moved on. Immediate or prompt feedback allows students to make corrections while the material is still fresh.
Several studies argue that delaying feedback reduces its impact. In a study by Vattøy et al. (2021), for example, it was shown that feedback should be “provided timely, extensively, and cumulatively”.
Testing Tip #5: Use Tests for Target Setting
This is probably the one step that the overwhelming majority of teachers forget to action. Once a test is finished, and feedback is given, we tend to forget about it and never revisit it.
This is a huge mistake and a massive loss of both leverage and educational capital.
In a previous blog post entitled Using Data to Empower Students, I described how we, as teachers, are generally very good at collecting data but we are often unsure what to do with that data once it’s collected.
The answer is simple: students need to reflect on their assessments and create personal targets (and the teacher needs to know what those targets are). This could be as simple as the students writing targets on the front of the completed paper, with the teacher then taking a photograph of those targets before inputting them into a spreadsheet.
Then comes the real magic! Before the next test, be sure to ask each student “What’s your target for this test?”, or “What targets did you write down last time?”. Ask these questions often: you’ll be amazed at how powerful they can be!
Bibliography and References
Vattøy, K-D., Gamlem, S. M. & Rogne, W. M. (2021) Examining students’ feedback engagement and assessment experiences: a mixed study. Studies in Higher Education, 46(11), pp. 2325-2337. doi:10.1080/03075079.2020.1723523
