Diagnostic and Formative Testing

Placement Testing

Testing in The Instructional Process

Teacher main concern during the instructional program is with the learning progress being made by students. There are two questions such as following must be answered:

On which learning tasks are the students progressing satisfactorily? On which ones do they need help?

Which students are having such severe learning problem that they need remedial work?

Formative tests are tests used to monitor student progress during instruction. Formative tests are typically designed to measure the extent to which students have mastered the learning outcomes of a rather limited segment of instruction, such as a unit or a textbook chapter. Formative tests similiar to quizzes and unit tests that teachers have traditionally used, but they placed greater emphasis on:

• Measuring all of the intended outcomes of the unit of instruction
• Using the result to improve learning (rather than to asign grades).

Formative tests used to identidy the students’ learning successes and failures so that adjustments in instruction and learnig can be made. When the majority of the students fail a test item, or set of item, tha material typically retaught in a group setting. When a minority of students experience learning failures, alternate methods of study are usually prescribed for each student (for axample, reading assignmentsin a second book, programmed instruction, and visual aids). These corrective prescriptions are frequently keyed to each item, or to each set of items designed to measure a separate learning task, so that student can begin immediately after testing to correct their individual learning failures.

The formative test determines whether a student has mastered the learning task being taught and, if not, prescribes how to remedy the learning failures

Diagnostic test is useful when a student’ learning problems are so persistent. The student failures cannot be resolved by corrective prescriptions of formative testing, a more intensive study of the students’ difficulties is called for.

Diagnostic test typically include a realtively large number of test items in each specific area, with slight variations from one item to the next so that the cause of specific learning errors can be identified. These test attempts to answer the following such questions:

Are the students’ difficulties in German due to their inadequate knowledge of vocabulary or to their poor grasp of certain elements of grammar?

Are the students’ having difficulties in addition because do not know certain number combinations or beacuse they do not know how to carry?

Thus, the diagnostic test focuses on the common sources of error encountered by students, so that the learning difficulties can be pinpointed and remedied.

Diagnostic test is designed to probe deeper into the causes of learning deficiencies that are left unresolved by formative testing.