Primary school testing: Government should focus on supporting teachers to address learning needs – Tom Pearce

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford announced standardised testing for primary pupils this week. Photo / Mark Mitchell

THREE KEY FACTS:

• The Government has announced the introduction of standardised testing in primary schools nationwide from next year.
• From 2025, testing will assess reading, writing and maths annually for Years 3, 6 and 8. New entrants will face a phonics check to help teachers understand how well they can read.
• The initiative forms part of the Government’s strategy to get 80% of students “at curriculum” by the time they reach high school.

Tom Pearce is a doctoral student in the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work. His research looks at the use of assessment in primary schools.

OPINION

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.

Stanford said this is about giving parents “certainty about how their kids are doing at school”, while Prime Minister Christopher 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 for thought over this policy.

To be clear, 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 Progressive Achievement Tests (Pats) and e-asTTle.

These assessments are time-consuming and disruptive. It can throw off an entire week, co-ordinating 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.

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-forward, 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 don’t align with teachers’ perceptions. This cuts both ways, because teacher judgments 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.

Rather than seeing a bad test score as an opportunity to improve, many students simply internalise the idea that they shouldn’t try.

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 Stanford’s claims to the contrary, what she is introducing are high-stakes tests. They are reported to parents, school boards and the Ministry of Education. 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 aren’t up to the task 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, which produces the Pats that are soon to become compulsory, has 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 Stanford 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.