Pre-testing means giving learners a test on a new topic before teaching it*. For example, a teacher of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (RPE) is about to teach students a unit on Buddhism but first asks a series of questions in a pre-test, including: When was Buddhism founded? Who founded it? What are the 4 Noble Truths? What are the 8 parts of the Eightfold Path? (these may not be the best questions for a pre-test on Buddhism, but you get the point!).
Some pros of pre-testing
Pre-testing: 1) Ensures teachers have thought carefully about the content they need to test, in order to construct key questions on it 2) Obliges learners to think about the key content, in a carefully structured way 3) Clarifies for the teacher and each learner what they already know on this topic, and what they don’t – I either already know something about the 4 Noble Truths, or I don’t. 4) Provides information to the teacher about the gaps in each student’s current knowledge of the topic, as a potential aid to planning the teaching to come. 5) Provides a robust way to measure progress in learning in the short term.
I just want to dwell on this last point for a moment: without a pre-test, it’s impossible to accurately measure progress in the short term. To measure a student’s progress on the topic of Buddhism, for example, you would have to assess their knowledge at the start of the topic and then again at the end – ideally using the same test for the most accurate picture of progress. If I score 14 out of 50 on the Buddhism pre-test and 42 out of 50 on the same test taken at the end of the topic, the amount of progress I have made is clear – I knew about 28% of the content before I started the topic and now I know about 84% of the topic at the end of it – I have therefore made 54% progress by the end of the topic. Without pre-tests, you can measure attainment but you can’t measure the amount of progress that has been made, because you don’t know the starting points of individual students.
Some cons of pre-testing
1) It’s a huge amount of extra work for teachers. Workload is a significant issue for teachers, and pre-testing would effectively double the amount of assessment they would have to do; so, for example, if a teacher teaches eight classes and each class currently does three formal assessments per year, that’s 24 in total; this would double to 48 with pre-testing. 2) Why would we need to know the amount of progress students have made over the course of a topic? It might be quite nice to know, but what practical purpose does knowing serve? We already get information about the students’ attainment from the end of topic test, and we can measure progress over time by either using end of year exams and/or assessing the level of students’ typical work between, say, the beginning and end of a school year, or twice-yearly etc. 3) Linked to point 2, whether we do a pre-test or not, we are still going to teach the students what we think they should know about Buddhism using the most effective techniques available. And if some of them know a bit more than others before we start the topic, so what? In typical classes of 25-30 students, it’s impossible to personalise the teaching to the individual circumstances of each person. Pre-testing would be very useful in one-to-one teaching, but it’s far less useful with the large groups we teach in schools.
Pre-testing might well be a nice-to-have technique, but I think the cons of pre-testing significantly outweigh the pros.
*In this blog, I don’t mean baseline testing when I talk about pre-testing. Baseline tests are a kind of pre-test, but this blog is about pre-testing in specific school subjects.
