There are many ways rather than just testing

Testing has been the most frequent and also the most traditional approach to measure achievement in education. There could be a large number of reasons why it has been happening knowingly that we are in a digital area where you can surf through the internet to look for a different alternative for your pedagogical model. I do not want to seem risky or say something premeditated against testing, but what I do feel very confident to say is that testing has reached its popularity thanks to its practicality, reliability, accuracy, etc. and that is what education needs in order to standardize, regulate, homogenize  information or “knowledge” to be taught. On the other hand, that approach as testing indeed is facilitates the teacher’s job, because measuring achievement by this approach is not time consuming and is easy to show evidences and that is in fact what parents want. According to this, testing has an advantage over the other methods for the reason that it is a formal procedure with time limitations, totally different to what assessing considers; because assessing refers to a much broader concept, to put it easier to understand while a teacher is teaching he could be also assessing at the same time.

Measuring achievement is a very controversial issue, because the good teacher has to consider on one side the different assessing methods an on the other side their students skills. The teacher must take into account a set of factors at the moment of building an appropriate assessing model. For example he has to focus on processes as well as products, he must also make his students perform, create, produce or do something related to the goals of the curriculum but in a suitable way. One more aspect to consider is that measuring achievement must be done to motivate students to learn or to show what they know. Putting it in other words, measuring achievement is an issue that ought to make teachers to think beyond testing and also to find the proper method to capture and analyze every single prove that can be used to show what students really know or how their processes are being developing.

To sum it up, testing is not the only way to measure students’ learning process. The teacher has to play a balance-game between practicality and reliability with washback and authenticity. Practicality and reliability that is what testing offers help the teacher to minimize time and money and on the other side to be “precise” with their students’ grades. But the teacher cannot ignore other methods to assess such as portfolios, journals, conferences and interviews, observations, etc.  Because as the teacher puts all those considerations to turn around inside a balance container I am pretty sure he will develop a set of tools to assess his students triangulating all the possible evidences.