This blog post was originally published in the New Zealand Herald. You can read it here.
Education Minister Erica Stanford has announced the government’s plans for standardised assessments in primary schools. Starting in 2026 all schools will have to use either the Progressive Achievement Tests or e-asTTle, with younger students sitting phonics screenings.
The Minister said this is about giving parents “certainty about how their kids are doing at school”, while Prime Minister Chris Luxon said that it was too late for students to get to Year 10 or 11 before they are assessed.
The idea that students are making it to Year 10 before being assessed in our schools is insulting to teachers, and untrue. In fact the cohort of students currently performing poorly in NCEA are a generation of National Standards. Many had a “below standard” label attached to them for most of their primary school career. The failure of National Standards to improve results or close the gap for “target students” should already give the government pause over this policy.
To be clear, Minister Stanford is correct that assessment is crucial for effective teaching. All research suggests that improving teachers’ ability to interpret and use data from assessments can help improve student outcomes. At the moment, many teachers leave university poorly prepared to use assessment to inform their teaching. Some schools are not using assessment and data effectively.
However this is only half the story. My research looks at how assessment is actually enacted in classrooms. Contrary to what Stanford claimed, most teachers do not like PATs and e-asTTle.
These assessments are time consuming and disruptive. It can throw off an entire week, coordinating for every student to access a device, and ensuring the devices are working, appropriate test conditions are observed, students who are absent are caught up, and that all the assessments are completed.
Minister Stanford made it clear she wanted these tests to be used to identify learning gaps and inform teaching. However, teachers have to make constant evidence-based decisions around things like feedback and feed-foward, grouping, content, and learning goals. Twice-yearly snapshots are just not very useful for the day-to-day of teaching, compared to other kinds of assessment.
The data often doesn’t align with teachers’ perceptions. This cuts both ways, because teacher judgements are often inaccurate and heavily biased by factors like gender, behaviour, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.
But tests are not as objective as many people believe either. They have implicit social and cultural biases, particularly for younger students whose learning and life experience are so heavily shaped by their background and family life.
Factors like language ability, test taking skills, anxiety or motivation also distort test results. It is commonly said that test scores mostly reflect how much a student cares about doing well, and research suggests this is particularly true for New Zealand students.
My research suggests that teachers see these problems most clearly. “But I see him do that in class!” and “but we’ve covered that so often!” are common laments, and teachers have expressed their frustration watching students guess every question on a test because they want to finish quickly.
The mismatch between test results and what teachers see students doing in the classroom erodes their trust in the data from standardised assessments. To repair that trust and allow teachers to actually use the data they need to feel supported, not accountable, and data needs to be contextualised. Mandated standardised testing makes that difficult, and raises the stakes of the tests significantly.
And despite Minister Stanford’s claims to the contrary, what she is introducing are high-stakes tests. They are reported to parents, boards and the Ministry. Data will be publicly available, and will lead to league tables.
For teachers, high-stakes tests increase anxiety, stress and workload significantly. Students find testing stressful too, and frequent poor test results can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than seeing a bad test score as an opportunity to improve, many students simply internalise the idea that they’re not good enough and shouldn’t try.
High-stakes put pressure on teachers to use more impoverished teaching practices, and result in students learning a narrower, shallower curriculum. Even NZCER, who produce the PATs that are soon to become compulsory, have cautioned against this. We risk having a “two-tier” curriculum emerge in which students at poorer schools, where test scores tend to be lower, simply get coached on the basics, while students at wealthier schools enjoy broader and deeper learning experiences.
None of these ill effects are unavoidable, but the Minister needs to acknowledge the system-wide impact that this policy will have.
We risk the tail wagging the dog, with an over-emphasis on these tests depriving our students of deep and broad curriculum learning experiences.
Instead of mandated tests, the government should be focused on supporting teachers and schools to gather, interpret and act on the range of evidence they need to best address all students’ learning needs.
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