Testing practices and pedagogy.

I am nearly finished with my bachelor’s degree in accounting and I can’t help but continue to mull over testing methodologies and what is most conducive to student learning.

Among the teachers and professors, there seems to be a fairly uniform split between their views on testing practices, which, when stripped of nuance, breaks down to “easy test” vs “hard test” teaching methods.

If we are able to break the pedagogical process down into two distinct phases, they would be the “learning phase” and the “testing phase.” I am strongly of the opinion that the most difficult portion of the educational process should come during the learning phase, which includes the lecture and in-class problems, the reading, the homework, and the reflection writing assignments. By comparison, the test should be easy, but still difficult enough to separate the students who do not understand the concepts that were taught.

To put it simply, if the learning objectives for the students are to learn concept A and concept B, the test should not be the first place that students are expected to figure out that A + B = concept C. If it is important for students to know that A + B = C, that should have been harped on during the learning phase.

I have had both types of professors in all subject fields, and I cannot understand why a disconnect like this has not been ratified in terms of best practice.

In my calculus class, for example, the problems that we work in class are way more complex than anything she would put on the test. My accounting class is precisely the opposite. The lectures, in class problems, and homework assignments are stupidly easy, but then the test is an esoteric beast that most of the class fails.

Again, my argument is that the difficulty should come during the learning phase, and the test should be a regurgitation of concepts, not a field where hidden concepts are unearthed. I truly believe there are professors out there who do this on purpose as a way to “weed out” students who didn’t go the extra mile. But I do not think that this practice fosters the most amount of learning.

Submitted February 24, 2024 at 10:00AM by Truth_Crisis https://ift.tt/xi294yB