It was exactly 36 years ago today that I was first asked the question, “What difference, if any, is there between the words test and assessment?”
Frankly, it wasn’t a question that I had ever thought about. Like most everyone else, I used the words synonymously, just as likely to use one as the other at any given time. But it was just the type of question over which we might kill a half hour on the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving. And so, we did.
I started by stating the obvious: the two words are used interchangeably. Adding the pedestrian observation that assessment felt like something “bigger” or “more important” than a test. After all, you never hear the expression, “This is only an assessment.” The discussion was off and running, ideas tossed back and forth among the six of us for the next 15 minutes or so. Undoubtedly it would have gone on even longer if this gathering was not my doctoral defense. So, the conversation was steered back to the factors influencing the cognitive emphasis of classroom tests.
Unlike the rest of that afternoon, that question stuck in my mind. Are test and assessment synonyms? Should we be using them interchangeably?
Over the next three decades I found myself working on state tests, assessments, testing programs, assessment programs, several assessment systems – and even one “instructional results information system.” The acronym most often being the determining factor in whether the object of our attention was a test or an assessment.
But the question lingered. As the field wound itself into knots over the difference between tests and testing, that Friday afternoon in November 1989 and the unaswered question about test and assessment bounced around the back of my mind.
A Formative Answer From The Classroom
Perhaps the closest that the field has come to collectively answering the question was in its defense of formative assessment, clearly defining formative assessment as a process several times between 2000 and 2020, including in the 2014 edition of the Standards. The revised definition published by CCSSO in 2018 begins
Formative assessment is a planned, ongoing process used by all students and teachers during learning and teaching to elicit and use evidence of student learning to improve student understanding of intended disciplinary learning outcomes and support students to become self-directed learners.
Formative assessment – singular, no ending ‘s’ included, implied, or allowed – was a process. We could easily extend the same logic and conclusion to the use of the word assessment, in general, I suppose.
Still unclear, however, was what happened when you did add the ‘s’ to convert assessment to assessments. Were assessments synonymous with tests? If so, logically, when you do the math and cancel out the ‘s’, we are reduced once again to
ASSESSMENT = TEST
We were not out of the woods.
Meanwhile…
As part of the formative fracas, the field had to find a place for those tests positioning themselves as formative assessment (or assessments), and the term interim assessment(s) was born. I can trace the term, interim assessment, back to 2008-2009 and my colleagues at the Center for Assessment – my Center fleece still keeping me warm on this chilly November morning. As Marianne Perie et al. explained,
We have started with these definitions of summative, interim and formative assessment because we believe that even assessment experts have been hobbled by the lack of clear definitions of assessment types and the abundant use of the term “formative assessment” to apply to assessments of very different design and purposes. This imprecision has led to a blurring of the differences between what we call “formative assessment” and what we call “interim assessment”.
Hobbled, imprecision, blurring. What lovely word choices to describe the situation. Words matter.
Although the term may have appeared much later, I can trace the concept of interim assessment back to the 1970s and 1980s and that same building where I was pondering the difference between assessment and test in 1989.
For my money, the roots of interim assessment can be traced back to the work being led by Stan Deno, an alternative form of assessment that eventually emerged as curriculum-based measurement. Marston and Tindal adapted student-based CBM into a district progress monitoring tool in Minneapolis that today one might call through-year assessment. Various others from Minnesota made the decision to take their talents took to the Pacific Northwest, and well, you know the rest of that story.
The key takeaway here being that like formative assessment, interim assessment was always envisioned as a process. Something that involved collecting data over time, evaluating change (or lack thereof), and making appropriate, informed instructional and/or higher-level decisions.
A consensus is beginning to take shape. Assessment is a process. But what about tests and testing? And should we even be using the term assessments?
A Voice From On High
Never one to shy away from controversy, Greg Cizek, in the opening of his 2020 book, Validity An Integrated Approach to Test Score Meaning and Use, decided to make one final attempt to answer the question and clarify our use of the terms test and assessment.
As a brief aside, sometimes the term assessment is used incorrectly as a synonym for test…an assessment is best defined as the collection of many samples of information—that is, many tests—toward a specific purpose. In the context of education, Cizek (1997, p. 10) had defined assessment as “the planned process of gathering and synthesizing information relevant to the purposes of: discovering and documenting students’ strengths and weaknesses; planning and enhancing instruction; or evaluating and making decisions about students.” In every case, assessment involves collecting and summarizing information in order to develop a course of action uniquely tailored to an individual’s needs.
The assessment involves aggregating all of the diverse sources of information, arriving at some tentative conclusions about what is happening for the student, and developing some tentative plans regarding appropriate placements, interventions, and supports. Overall, the terms test and assessment have quite different meanings and cannot appropriately be used interchangeably. (pp 6-7)
What then is a test?
First, it is important to realize that a test is a sample, and only a sample of a test taker’s knowledge, skill, ability, interest, or other attribute which cannot be directly observed and about which information is desired. It is often incorrectly concluded that a test score represents a highly definitive, concrete, or conclusive piece of information about a test taker. The fact that a test is only a sample of a test taker’s responses suggests otherwise…Tests typically capture only a small portion of what could be observed, so it is essential that the sample is one that is carefully structured. (p. 2)
The distinction between assessment and test seems quite clear. Fatalistically, however, Cizek concludes
Nonetheless, it is also likely that the terms are now so pervasively used as synonyms that fussing about the distinction is fruitless. (p. 7)
Assessment, Test, and a Fig Tree
If the distinction between assessment and test were merely an academic debate around a conference room table in Minnesota on a brisk, November afternoon, I would be inclined to agree with Cizek. Let’s move on. Our resources are limited and there are many other issues in education, measurement, testing, and assessment worth the fighting for.
In this case, however, I am reminded of the parable of the fig tree that didn’t bear fruit (Luke 13:6-9):
Jesus told this story: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard. He came looking for some fruit on the tree, but he found none. So the man said to his gardener, ‘I have been looking for fruit on this tree for three years, but I never find any. Cut it down. Why should it waste the ground?’ But the servant answered, ‘Master, let the tree have one more year to produce fruit. Let me dig up the dirt around it and put on some fertilizer. If the tree produces fruit next year, good. But if not, you can cut it down.’”
I think that we owe it to ourselves, and more importantly to students, teachers, and other users of our services, to give clarifying the distinction between test and assessment one more try. To commit to caring for our fig tree.
For reasons that I began to lay out last week, we need the fruit.
At the very least, we need to close the loop and make the same kind of definitive statement about summative assessment that we have made about formative assessment and is inherent in the use of interim assessment.
We need to state clearly that a summative test such as the external, on-demand, largely standardized instruments used as state tests to meet the requirements of NCLB and inform accountability decision are simply tests. No more. No less. A small sample of a small portion of what could be observed about an individual student.
They serve a distinct and useful, but limited purpose – a purpose that is growing more limited as content and achievement standards have become more complex.
We need to state clearly that what is needed is a process of summative assessment:
- a planned, ongoing process used by all students and teachers during learning and teaching
- a planned process of gathering and synthesizing information relevant to the purpose of…discovering and documenting students’ strengths and weaknesses; evaluating and making decisions about students.
Having accomplished that task, we can turn our attention and resources toward supporting summative student assessment.
I think that state-supported, school-based tests and other tools will be a critical part of that process. Competency-based models of testing are one example of the type of performance-based tests that are being developed to support such a summative assessment process.
Psychometricians Got To Know Their Limitations
For those of us involved in large-scale state testing since NCLB, the real test is going to be our willingness and ability to play a supporting role. We are not the experts. In supporting summative student assessment, we are going to have to master and exhibit many of the competencies identified in the Skills for The Future Taxonomy: adaptability, building relationships, collaboration, communication, compassion, creativity, critical thinking, curiosity – and those are only the skills through the c’s.
True, that’s a role that we should have been playing all along, but it’s not a role with which many of us are familiar and comfortable. NCLB with its own uppercase C, Compliance, may have drilled a lot of those other competencies out of a couple of generations of psychometricians and testing specialists.
I prefer to believe, however, that those competencies are still there, merely buried deeply in our roots. With some special care and a deliberate process, I am confident that we, as a field and individuals, will be able to bear fruit in the way we once did.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 