Athena Rayne Anderson

I’ve always understood “teaching to the test” to mean a course is designed around a specific test. Obviously, an SAT prep course should be designed around the SAT and developing the skills to be successful with that assessment. So what’s the big deal?

The term appears to be used only in cases where a class was NOT created to prepare students for a specific test. Let’s say we’re using the term as it applies to classes that aren’t “test prep.”

Teaching to the test can take many forms (Volante 2004; Zakharov & Carnoy 2021), including:

• Covering only the material that is assessed on the test
• Using practice tests multiple times in the class
• Giving students the exact questions they’ll be required to answer on the test

I was fortunate in my education to have experienced none of these situations. In fact, I’d never heard of the phrase “teaching to the test” until I was in my late 20s. I might be a member of the last generation in which this was not a common phenomenon.

On one hand, I have a hard time believing any self-respecting educator would do any of the things from the list above. One of the functions of education is to teach people how to think and learn. Teaching to the test is in direct violation of this function because it only trains people in memorization. In some cases, it only trains them in test-taking strategies, which aren’t always applicable to real life. On the other hand, what’s a teacher to do if they’re blamed for poor standardized test scores and made to belive their livelihood depends on whether or not their students pass a standardized test?

The answer, of course, is to use instructional design!

Didn’t see that coming, did you?

The Backwards Design (BD) strategy is always my recommendation for creating a learning unit. It’s especially useful in cases where a standardized test is involved, because someone has basically provided you with the Learning Objectives (LOs). Hopefully, the test outcomes use measurable verbs but, being rather cynical and knowing that instructional design basics are not taught to most educators and administrators, I would be surprised if this was always the case.

But that’s okay, because you’re learning instructional design basics from this blog (and in my book, Simple Instructional Design) that you can use to create your own measurable LOs to align with the outcomes you’ve been given! When you use instructional design to craft a course that will meet standardized test outcomes, your decisions are based on published evidence of how to best facilitate learning.

Teaching to the test should never be necessary or desirable because instructional design principles show you how to craft a learning unit that best facilitates student success.

References

Volante, L. 2004. Teaching to the test: What every educator and policy-maker should know. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy. 35. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ848235

Zakharov, A. & Carnoy, M. 2021. Does teaching to the test improve student learning? International Journal of Educational Development. 84. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102422