Purposeful, Purposeless, and Purpose-lost Testing

I usually define assessment as the intentional collecting of specific information for the purpose of making a decision (e.g., a proficiency decision, an admissions decision). One can consider testing a subset of assessment. Unfortunately, testing (i.e., the act of giving students some kind of test) does not always match this definition of assessment, particularly in terms of intention.

In an ideal world, testing is purposeful. There is a need to collect information, and a particular testing instrument is chosen to collect that information in an efficacious manner. 

In the real world, however, much educational testing is purposeless. Teachers give tests every Friday because that is the way it has always been done; classes have a written final exam because the instructor hasn't considered other ways of assessing student learning over the course of the semester. The list goes on and on.

Recently, I've become convinced that there is a third category of testing: purpose-lost testing. Purpose-lost testing happens when a testing system outlives its original intention, or when a test's purpose gets lost in the telephone game between various levels of an educational bureaucracy. A state-wide testing program may have started with the noble intention of providing information for curricular reform, but becomes purpose-lost if it neither reflects the curriculum nor leads to meaningful reform when finally implemented.

Purpose-lost testing can also occur when well-meaning folks glom onto some testing method without fully understanding or appreciating the context for which the method evolved. Formative assessment and diagnostic testing often fall into this bucket.

A teacher who believes in "assessment for learning" has lost the plot if their syllabus states that "60% of your grade will be based on formative assessment scores" (essentially turning formative tests into summative ones).  Along the same lines, a "diagnostic" test implies that the testing instrument is capable of identifying specific strengths or deficiencies in some aspect of a student's performance for which there exists an optimal educational remedy -- the test should not be just another excuse to assign numbers to students.

The existence of purposeless and purpose-lost testing muddy the waters of the "Are tests good or bad?" debate. Educational assessment is hard enough already.