Last week Diana wrote in a comment here:
…assessments are given for only ONE reason…to inform the teacher how to BETTER teach their students….
That just doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t think teachers look upon testing as a way to get information to help them change their instructional practices. I never did that. Everything that caused me to change from my original traditional AP French practices was learned in my classroom while I was teaching. Some things worked and some didn’t and I changed accordingly.
In fact, if gathering information to enable a teacher to change their instructional practices is the only reason for testing, and if teachers don’t really use the results of testing in that way (they really don’t) then the entire testing world becomes highly suspect. What are the real motives for testing? I think that they are to enable a vast army of people who could never make it in classrooms – namely administrators – to meddle in the affairs of those who can.