My Students Are Sick of Tests. How Can I Assess Them Without Giving Another One?

A teacher asked me this at a conference and then added, a little apologetically, that she was sick of them too.

I want to reframe the problem slightly, because I do not think the issue is the number of assessments. I think it is that every one of them is the same event. Desks cleared. Silence. A packet. Points. A grade a week later. No reason to look at it again.

What students are sick of is that experience, not measurement, and that experience is not required by measurement. If an assessment looks and feels like a good lesson, students mostly do not register it as a test, and you still get what you need. Here are eight keys.

1. Assess with something to figure out, not with questions about a unit. Glove in a Microwave shows students someone putting water in a nitrile glove, tying it off, and running the microwave, then asks what happened to the weight. Sealed Terrarium shows a terrarium opened three times in 2,105 days and asks where the matter came from that let the plants grow. The Red Force Rollercoaster is 367 feet tall and hits 111 miles per hour in under five seconds, and asks how the number of riders affects the kinetic energy of the car. Students engage with these because they are interesting, not because they are graded.

2. Ask for an answer and then ask for the reason. Every part should have two questions. Choose the graph, sort the sources of matter, pick the model, and then explain why. The reason question is where you learn anything worth knowing, and it is also the least test-like part, because nobody has ever asked them to bubble in their reasoning.

3. Give it in parts, out loud, with the media. Project the page. Read the introduction aloud. Play the video. Read the directions. Give ten to twenty minutes for that part, then move on. This is exactly what you would do with a good lesson, and it is not an accident that it looks that way.

4. Let students talk between the parts. When you are using the task to find out what students think before a unit, stop after each part and let them share. Then close by telling them the truth: “I heard so many good ideas, and we are going to use them as we learn more about this in our next unit.” Framed that way, the assessment becomes the opening of a unit rather than the closing of one, and the uncertainty it surfaces is what makes students want to keep going.

5. Do not put a grade on the ones designed to teach. This matters more than it sounds. A grade tells students the learning is finished. If you write careful individual feedback and also write a number at the top, most students read the number and stop. When students know an assessment is meant to help them improve and will not affect their grade, they actually read what you wrote.

6. Write feedback students can act on, then give them somewhere to act on it. You review each student’s responses, identify what is missing or off in the reasoning, and write instructional advice rather than a judgment. Not “incorrect,” but something like “a change of state is not evidence that a new substance formed, because things can melt and freeze without a chemical reaction.” Then hand the packet back with a final part attached that asks how their thinking has changed. I used to think, but now I think. It closes the loop, and it is often the first time a student has been asked to notice their own ideas moving.

7. Let students keep it. They keep the completed packet, feedback and all, and can pull it back out when studying for something higher stakes. An assessment a student keeps is a fundamentally different object from one they hand in and never see again.

8. Use one task three times, for three different purposes. This is how you reduce the total volume of testing rather than add to it. The same task can be given before a unit to find out what students think, and analyzed by sorting responses into ways of thinking. It can be given again after your first round of instruction, with feedback written and the reflection part attached, to help students improve. And it can be given at the end, scored against the performance expectation, to document what students learned. One recurring routine and three kinds of information, instead of three separate testing events that all feel the same.

Putting It All Together

You are probably not going to reduce the number of assessments in your building. What you can change is what assessment feels like in your room.

An assessment that starts with a video of something strange, asks students to explain their thinking, lets them talk to each other, comes back with advice instead of a number, and ends with a question about how their ideas have changed is still measurement. It is measurement that does not announce itself, and that does something for students on the way through rather than only reporting on them afterward.

One thing worth saying to students out loud: figuring things out and explaining your thinking is what we do in science. When assessment looks like the rest of the class, it stops being a separate and unpleasant genre.

How ADI Makes This Easier

Building an assessment that does not feel like a test is harder than building one that does. You need a phenomenon students find genuinely puzzling, an answer question and a reason question in each part, multiple parts that connect, alignment to the standard you are responsible for, and all of it short enough to fit in a period.

Phenomenon-Driven Tasks are designed for this. Each runs in roughly thirty to forty-five minutes, is built around a real phenomenon, pairs every answer with a reason, includes a reflection part for educative use, and comes with the videos and images in the ADI Learning Hub so you can present it rather than photocopy it.

Want to See One?

Browse the Phenomenon-Driven Tasks books at shop.argumentdriveninquiry.com/collections/phenomenon-driven-tasks, or learn more about ADI curriculum materials, the ADI Learning Hub, and our professional learning options at argumentdriveninquiry.com.