Tests worth having: Telling teachers who needs to be taught what next

This was a presentation to the Measurement and Evaluation of Academic Achievement Academic Seminar, on Sept. 17, 2023 at Thammasat University Faculty of Learning Sciences and Education, in Bangkok Thailand. I argue that teachers need better assessment tools to find out who needs to be taught what next. I suggest the New Zealand Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning system is a good example of how teachers can be helped to use tests formatively and diagnostically.

the paper draws on work published in:

• Archer, E., & Brown, G. T. L. (2013). Beyond rhetoric: Leveraging learning from New Zealand's assessment tools for teaching and learning for South Africa. Education as Change, 17(1), 131-147. https://doi.org/10.1080/16823206.2013.773932
• Brown, G. T. L. (2013). asTTle—A national testing system for formative assessment: How the national testing policy ended up helping schools and teachers. In M. K. Lai & S. Kushner (Eds.), A National Developmental and Negotiated Approach to School and Curriculum Evaluation (pp. 39-56). Emerald Group Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1474-7863(2013)0000014003
• Brown, G. T. (2019). Technologies and infrastructure: costs and obstacles in developing large-scale computer–based testing. Education Inquiry, 10(1), 4-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2018.1529528
• Brown, G. T., & Hattie, J. (2012). The benefits of regular standardized assessment in childhood education: Guiding improved instruction and learning. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary educational debates in childhood education and development (pp. 287-292). Routledge.
• Brown, G. T. L., O'Leary, T. M., & Hattie, J. A. C. (2018). Effective Reporting for Formative Assessment: the asTTle case example. In D. Zapata-Rivera (Ed.), Score reporting: Research and applications (pp. 107-125). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351136501-11
• Hattie, J. A., & Brown, G. T. (2010). Assessment and evaluation. In C. Rubie-Davies (Ed.), Educational psychology: Concepts, research and challenges (pp. 116-131). Routledge.
• Hattie, J. A., & Brown, G. T. L. (2008). Technology for school-based assessment and assessment for learning: Development principles from New Zealand. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 36(2), 189-201. https://doi.org/10.2190/ET.36.2.g
• Hattie, J. A., Brown, G. T. L., Ward, L., Irving, S. E., & Keegan, P. J. (2006). Formative evaluation of an educational assessment technology innovation: Developers' insights into Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning (asTTle). Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 3(5), 1-54. https://journals.sfu.ca/jmde/index.php/jmde_1/article/view/50