It’s Monday morning and the suspense of the upcoming math quizzes, English assessments and chemistry tests sink in as students scramble to memorize facts and formulas. These high-stake assessments can require hours of preparation and have a crucial impact in one’s final grade.
Teachers should include more low-stake assessments in their curriculum because high-stake exams are not an accurate representation of a students’ abilities and limit their chance to fully demonstrate the skills they’ve learned.
While some might argue that multiple-choice assessments and binary tests allow for easy, fair grading, they only apply to certain learning styles and restrict the way in which students can demonstrate their knowledge.
A study on chronic stress and testing from The National Bureau of Economic Research found that students had around 15% more cortisol, a stress hormone, in their systems on weeks with high-stakes testing than on weeks without any testing.
They also gathered that students who showed a greater variation of cortisol levels between testing and non testing weeks tended to perform worse on exams than expected given their classwork and performance on lower-stakes tests.
To more accurately measure their students’ learning, teachers should include more low-stakes assessments like graded in-class discussions. By factoring more low-stake assessments into final grades, along with some high-stakes tests, students can exhibit their comprehension in ways that assure the teacher of their understanding and allow them to feel like their knowledge is being effectively communicated.
