THE CLASSROOM SITUATION: MEASURING AND EVALUATING THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS THROUGH STANDARDISED TESTING

This paper was triggered by an informal discussion that one of the writers had with pre-service student teachers who were doing their teaching practice at Christian College High School in June 2014. Most of these student teachers could not clearly distinguish norm-referenced evaluation tests from criterion-referenced evaluation tests. The paper, thus, sought to distinguish between norm-referenced measurement and criterion-referenced measurement in teaching and learning. The paper is based on the notion that the purpose of teaching is to make someone learn new things that would improve the learner’s understanding of his / her surroundings. The major challenge, however, has been on how to ensure that the individual is motivated to learn and that learning actually occurs. Tradition has been to use assessment tools, especially standardised tests. Standardised tests are made up of testing tools administered and scored in a consistent and pre-established standard. The traditional types of standardised tests are categorized into norm-referenced measurement tests and criterion-referenced measurement tests. The two tests are different in their intended purposes, content selection, and their scoring process that defines how the test results have to be interpreted. Norm-referenced tests compare the student's scores to that of a representative sample of students (referred to as the normative group) of the same-age or same grade. Criterion-referenced tests compare students’ scores to predetermined criteria (for example school curricula). In this paper we examine the differences between these two types of student performance evaluation and explain the most appropriate uses of each in teaching and learning.