Polytechnic University of the Philippines

College of Education
Bachelor in Elementary and Secondary

Education

Sta. Mesa, Manila

MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION

A report on:
IMPORTANCE AND FUNCTIONS OF TEST IN EDUCATION

SUBMITTED BY:
Cuarto, Ronalyn R.
Del Rosario, Venn Marijan F.
German, Andrea
Pancho, Melissa Anne Marie A.
Quiton, Joshua Lloyd L.
Relano, Maria Concepcion O.
Ribano, Nicole B.

SUBMITTED TO:
Prof. Jay-R A. Manamtam
BSEDEN 4-1D
June 21, 2015
Introduction

Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

1 | Page

Educational assessment typically is initiated when a student has difficulty meeting

expectations for academic performance. There are many standardized tests and procedures
that can be used to identify a students academic strengths and limitations, as well as his or
her competence in domains that contribute to academic achievement, such as language and
cognition. However, school professionals recognize that effective school performance also
depends on a students ability to perform a variety of functional tasks that enable him or her
to participate in the various learning activities of the school day. These functional tasks are
often referred to as nonacademic tasks. Students with disabilities often have difficulty
meeting performance expectations on these tasks because of limitations resulting from their
physical or cognitive impairments. Therefore, performance on nonacademic tasks needs to
be included in an assessment of a students educational difficulties. In many situations,
efforts to minimize or compensate for these functional limitations may be a central focus of
the students special education program.
Why is Assessment Important?
Assessment is important because of all the decisions you will make about children
when teaching and caring for them. The decisions facing our three teachers at the beginning
of this chapter all involve how best to educate children. Like them, you will be called upon
every day to make decisions before, during, and after your teaching.
Whereas some of these decisions will seem small and inconsequential, others will be
high stakes, influencing the life course of children. All of your assessment decisions taken
as a whole will direct and alter childrens learning outcomes. Below outlines for you some
purposes of assessment and how assessment can enhance your teaching and student
learning. All of these purposes are important; if you use assessment procedures
appropriately, you will help all children learn well.
The following general principles should guide both policies and practices for the
assessment of young children:

Assessment should bring about benefits for children. Gathering accurate information
from young children is difficult and potentially stressful. Assessments must have a
clear benefiteither in direct services to the child or in improved quality of educational
programs.
Assessment should be tailored to a specific purpose and should be reliable, valid, and
fair for that purpose. Assessments designed for one purpose are not necessarily valid if
used for other purposes. In the past, many of the abuses of testing with young children
have occurred because of misuse.
Assessment policies should be designed recognizing that reliability and validity of
assessments increase with childrens age. The younger the child, the more difficult it is
to obtain reliable and valid assessment data. It is particularly difficult to assess
childrens cognitive abilities accurately before age six. Because of problems with
reliability and validity, some types of assessment should be postponed until children
are older, while other types of assessment can be pursued, but only with necessary
safeguards.
Assessment should be age appropriate in both content and the method of data
collection. Assessments of young children should address the full range of early
learning and development, including physical well-being and motor development;

Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

2 | Page

social and emotional development; approaches toward learning; language

development; and cognition and general knowledge. Methods of assessment should
recognize that children need familiar contexts to be able to demonstrate their abilities.
Abstract paper-and-pencil tasks may make it especially difficult for young children to
show what they know.
Assessment should be linguistically appropriate, recognizing that to some extent all
assessments are measures of language. Regardless of whether an assessment is
intended to measure early reading skills, knowledge of color names, or learning
potential, assessment results are easily confounded by language proficiency, especially
for children who come from home backgrounds with limited exposure to English, for
whom the assessment would essentially be an assessment of their English proficiency.
Each childs first- and second-language development should be taken into account
when determining appropriate assessment methods and in interpreting the meaning of
assessment results.
Parents should be a valued source of assessment information, as well as an audience
for assessment. Because of the fallibility of direct measures of young children,
assessments should include multiple sources of evidence, especially reports from
parents and teachers. Assessment results should be shared with parents as part of an
ongoing process that involves parents in their childs education.

Purposes of Assessment
Children
Identify what children know
Identify children's special needs
Determine appropriate placement
Select appropriate curricula to meet children's individual needs
Refer children and, as appropriate, their families for additional services to programs
and agencies
Families
Communicate with parents to provide information about their children's progress and
learning
Relate school activities to home activities and experiences
Early Childhood Programs
Make policy decisions regarding what is and is not appropriate for children
Determine how well and to what extent programs and services children receive are
beneficial and appropriate
Early Childhood Teachers
Identify children's skills, abilities, and needs
Make lesson and activity plans and set goals
Create new classroom arrangements
Select materials
Make decisions about how to implement learning activities
Report to parents and families about children's developmental status and achievement
Monitor and improve the teaching-learning process
Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

3 | Page

The

Meet the individual needs of children

Group for instruction
Public
Inform the public regarding children's achievement
Provide information relating to student's school-wide achievements
Provide a basis for public policy (e.g., legislation, recommendations, and statements)

Benefits of testing? Surely, to most educators, this statement represents an oxymoron.

Testing in schools is usually thought to serve only the purpose of evaluating students and
assigning them grades. Those are important reasons for tests, but not what we have in mind.
Most teachers view tests (and other forms of assessment, such as homework, essays, and
papers) as necessary evils. Yes, students study and learn more when given assignments and
tests, but they are an ordeal for both the student (who must complete them) and the teacher
(who must construct and grade them).
Quizzes and tests are given frequently in elementary schools, often at the rate of several or
more a week, but testing decreases in frequency the higher a student rises in the
educational system. By the time students are in college, they may be given only a midterm
exam and a final exam in many introductory level courses. Of course, standardized tests are
also given to students to assess their relative performance compared to other students in
their country and assign them a percentile ranking.
Besides these direct effects of testing, there are also indirect effects that are quite
positive. If students are quizzed frequently, they tend to study more and with more
regularity. Quizzes also permit students to discover gaps in their knowledge and focus study
efforts on difficult material; furthermore, when students study after taking a test, they learn
more from the study episode than if they had not taken the test.
Quizzing also enables better metacognitive monitoring for both students and teachers
because it provides feedback as to how well learning is progressing. Greater learning would
occur in educational settings if students used self-testing as a study strategy and were
quizzed more frequently in class. Published tests and assessments can play an important role
in understanding and improving student learning in colleges and universities by adding
dimensions and perspectives not available through locally developed tests, rubrics, and
surveys.
Published tests give colleges a sense of how their students compare against their
peers, and some published tests provide detailed feedback that lets colleges easily identify
relative strengths and weaknesses in their students performance. And because published
tests and assessments are typically developed by testing professionals, the quality of test
questions and problems may be superior to what faculty and staff at individual colleges can
develop.
The Purpose of Tests
What is the reason why teachers give students tests? Why do school districts and
states create high stakes tests for their students? On one level, the answer to this seems
fairly obvious: the reason why we give tests is to see what students have learned. However,
this only tells part of the story. Tests have many purposes in our schools. One thing that
Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

4 | Page

should be stressed is that in the end, tests should be for the benefit of the student and not
the teacher, school, district, or state. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Following is a
look at some of the major reasons why students are given assessments in and out of the
classroom.
1. To Identify What Students Have Learned
The obvious point of classroom tests is to see what the students have learned after the
completion of a lesson or unit. When the classroom tests are tied to effectively written lesson
objectives, the teacher can analyze the results to see where the majority of the students are
having problems with in their class. These tests are also important when discussing student
progress at parent-teacher conferences.

2. To Identify Student Strengths and Weaknesses

Another use of tests is to determine student strengths and weaknesses. One effective
example of this is when teachers use pretests at the beginning of units in order to find out
what students already know and where the teacher's focus needs to be. Further, learning
style and multiple intelligences tests help teachers learn how to best meet the needs of their
students through instructional techniques.

3. To Provide a Method for Awards and Recognition

Tests can be used as a way to determine who will receive awards and recognition. For
example, the PSAT is often given in the 10th grade to students across the nation. If a student
is a National Merit Scholar due to the results on this test, they are offered scholarships and
other forms of recognition.

4. To Gain College Credit

Advanced Placement exams provide students with the opportunity to earn college
credit after successfully completing a course and passing the exam with high marks. While
every university has its own rules on what scores to accept, most do give credit for these
exams. In many cases, students are able to begin college with a semester or even a year's
worth of credits under their belts.
5. To Provide a Way to Measure a Teacher and/or School's Effectiveness
Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

5 | Page

More and more states are tying funding to schools to the way that students perform on
standardized tests. Further some states are attempting to use these results when they
evaluation and give merit raises to the teachers themselves. This use of high stakes testing
is often contentious with educators since many factors can influence a student's grade on an
exam. Additionally, controversy can sometimes erupt over the number of hours schools use
to specifically 'teach to the test' as they prepare students to take these exams.

6. To Provide a Basis for Entry into an Internship, Program, or College

Tests have traditionally been used as a way to judge a student based on merit.
Additionally, students might be required to take additional exams to get into special
programs or be placed properly in classes. For example, a student who has taken a few years
of high school French might be required to pass an exam in order to be placed in the correct
year of French.

Yet another concern with published tests and assessments available for higher
education is that they often have more limited evidence of their quality than published tests
used in basic education. While validation studies at the K-12 level can involve tens of
thousands of students, studies of higher education tests often involve far smaller numbers of
students from institutions that may not be a representative sample of all colleges and
universities. While test publishers continue to work diligently to research and document the
validity and reliability of their tests, at this time we cannot have the same level of confidence
in higher education test results that we have at the K-12 level.
Published tests and assessments can yield valuable insight into student learning at the
higher education level, but only if (1) they correspond to the colleges goals for student
learning, (2) they yield useful feedback that will help the college identify areas that need
improvement, (3) they have convincing evidence of their quality (validity and reliability), and
(4) students have compelling incentives to give the tests their best effort. Because there is
no one perfect instrument, published tests and assessments should only be used in
combination with other evidence of student learning, including locally-developed measures,
job placement rates, and the like, in order to draw a more accurate overall picture of student
learning.
All who are concerned with the future of American higher education can take steps to
ensure that students graduate with appropriate knowledge, skills, and competencies. First,
we can continue to support the American system of accreditation, which requires all
accredited colleges to provide clear, compelling, and appropriate evidence of rigorous
student achievement. Second, we can continue to value the rich diversity of American higher
education and acknowledge that no one test can adequately evaluate the knowledge, skills,
and competencies expected of all of Americas college students. Finally, we can encourage
the development and use of assessment tools appropriate to each field of study and each
Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

6 | Page

sector of American higher education, so that all students graduate fully prepared for
successful careers and productive service to society.
REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
http://www.education.com/reference/article/why-assessment-important/
http://images.pearsonclinical.com/images/assets/SFA/SFAOverview.pdf
http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF%27s/BC_Roediger%20et%20al
%20%282011%29_PLM.pdf
https://www.msche.org/publications/published-instruments-in-higher-education.pdf
Notes
4. L. Shepard, S. L. Kagan, and E. Wurtz, Principles and Recommendations for Early
Childhood Assessments (Washington, DC: National Education Goals Panel, December 14,
1998), 5-6.

Importance and Functions of Tests in Education

7 | Page