Hold up: End-of-year testing doesn’t always carry weight

While end-of-year testing influences how teachers teach, experts caution against making major decisions about students around a single test.

A survey from Instructure, creator of the Canvas learning management system, shows that parents find end-of-year assessments only moderately effective–in fact, 66 percent of parents believe end-of-year testing is only slightly effective to not effective at all in assessing how much their child has learned and how prepared they are to move on to the next grade.

“End-of-year tests play a huge role in how teachers spend class time, especially as they wrap up the school year,” says Hilary Scharton, vice president of K–12 product strategy at Instructure. “When it comes to assessments, it’s important to remember that they can be built for different purposes, so we should ensure we’re not making high-stakes decisions about students based on a single test.”…Read More