Why I'm Not Warning My Kids About Tests

Last year, I decided to stop giving my students warnings about when they were going to be tested, and I'm just giving assessements impromptu. Possibly more importantly, I also don't tell them that it is a test.

At the very beginning, the kids were really suspicious, and my administrator warned me that there was going to be blowback from parents, but I never heard a peep from a single parent. And what actually happened with the kids was this:




80 percent of them consistently did better on assessments when I didn't tell them about the assessment. The other twenty percent hovered around the same place they usually did.

So here's my rationale:

1. When they don't know there's an assessment, they can't be plagued with test anxiety. Their affective filters stay low, they don't freak out, and they just do the assignment.

2. The assessments, by nature, therefore have to look exactly like classwork, which means I'm assessing them the way that I'm teaching them. This results in more authentic assessment that measures their actual levels of capability, and not how well they can answer a multiple choice question.

3. They can't cram, so I'm shown what they actually know, not what they memorized third period.

4. I can't ask anything I'm not 100 percent sure we covered and covered well.

5. It's encouragement for them to look at their notes nightly, if that's something you want.

6. It acts as a demonstration of where we need to do work instead of a punitive measure for not knowing things.

7. If it appears that they're not actually ready to be assessed when I'd intended to assess them, there's no draying over canceling and moving the test. They simply didn't need to know that was the plan.

I shared all of this with my students in explaining the plan, and there have been zero complaints once they realized it wasn't going to be as scary as they were envisioning. It's done wonders for their comfort levels, they don't freak out about 'whether this is going to be on the test,' because anything could be at any time (since there's not The Test), they pay better attention, and their grades have gone up as a boon. So far, it's been a win.

(relatedly, I quite literally just heard one of my students say to someone else, "But like, there are no identifiable tests, so I don't know when it's okay to forget things, so I have to just like keep remembering everything."
so that's a good reason, too. :D)