Purpose of Testing Needs to Shift, Experts Say

New York

“We’ve got to stop using assessments as a hammer and begin to use them appropriately, as a diagnostic and learning tool,” Kurt Landgraf, the president of the Educational Testing Service, said at the organization’s 2005 Invitational Conference here last week.

The two-day event, Oct. 10-11, focused on ways to embed assessments directly into teaching and learning to help teachers adjust instruction as it’s occurring. In the United States, participants argued, far more attention has been paid to using tests as an accountability tool, and to sort and classify students, than to shape what actually happens in the classroom.

While teachers give tests or quizzes and assign papers all the time, they said, the quality of those tools is often lacking. What’s more, the purpose typically is to grade students rather than to modify instruction or provide...