The idea that testing can provide teachers with valuable and necessary data that they need in order to target and teach their students effectively seem persuasive to many politicians and school administrators. This is also how testing technology based on IRT (Item Response Theory) often very forcefully argues why testing is necessary. It builds on an idea that we (society, parents, politicians, and of course teachers) need an assessment of what students know configured into reliable data in order to teach. In addition, it is often argued that in order to help students at risk this kind of assessment and testing is indispensable for teachers. Testing technology builds on an idea that objective and comparable data can provide a teacher with scores that tells her what her students know, comprehend and what they struggle with (see: (https://www.nwea.org/assessments/map/). Part of the underlying assumptions about the need to test children in order to assess and compare score, is the idea that children’s learning has stable and defined perimeters. It also assumes that learning is related to a kind of (universal) subject knowledge which is stable, and it presupposes that teachers need these instruments (tests) in order to validate their assessments and that teachers are not able to do this as part of their everyday teaching practice.
In this paper I argue that in teaching and learning processes one has to take into account that human values and wellbeing has to be grounded on human flourishing and diversity. My discussion in this paper is guided by the question: Can teaching be determined by testing? I take departure from the OECD report: “Universal basic skills, what countries stand to gain” (OECD, 2015) and analyse what kind of skills this report refers to. I show that basic skills are defined as cognitive skills, from this I go on to discuss how this form of knowing is made superior to everyday procedural skills – or practical knowledge. These basic (cognitive) skills are the same type of skills that are tested through PISA. Through psychometrics and the use of IRT (Item Response Theory) a test instrument is build up in order to secure and validate comparisons over a consecutive number of years, measuring the same type of cognitive skills across a very large population of students. With this as a background I started making inquiries about how this idea is permeating teaching and learning processes in school.
I then go on to show and argue how a testing industry promises how teaching can be made more effective. I have looked into NWEA (The North West Evaluation Association, USA) as one example of how assessing (testing) is framed. NWEA promises that they have developed an assessment system that measures academic progress (MAP®). Again what this computerized assessment/test measure is cognitive skills. The idea is that teaching can be developed based on this MAP test – because this give more accurate assessment of pupils. Indirectly this say that teacher assessments are unreliable (subjective) and this assumption seem to have a strong impact on how teaching and learning processes are perceived, by people both inside and outside of school. The argument I develop is concerned with what this kind of assessment does with teaching and consequently also students learning in school. Across many school systems in Europe this kind of testing is applied in school. I Have studied the development of this testing culture in the Norwegian national tests (https://www.udir.no/globalassets/filer/vurdering/nasjonaleprover/metodegrunnlag-for-nasjonale-prover.pdf).
