Creating people

How tests shape the way pupils see themselves

The individual in contemporary society is not so much described by tests as constructed by them (Allan Hanson, 1994)

Every time we share the results of an assessment with pupils, we add a drop in the ocean of who they believe themselves to be. We often think of testing pupils as merely a means to ascertain what they know, but we rarely stop to think how the very act also shapes their self-concept.

Revealing oneself through being tested is to make oneself vulnerable, both to the assessor, but also to the others that will come to hear about how well you have performed in the test. These micro-exposures provide us with repeated signals about how competent we are, how we compare to others, and what we may be worthy of achieving in the future.

The identity we form in turn effects how open we are to future learning opportunities. We may be spurred on to master curriculum content, or our minds may focus more narrowly on performing better next next. More worryingly, we may direct our efforts towards minimising our vulnerability, adopting avoidant behaviours that are less damaging to our sense of self.

In this post, we will consider how three factors come together to shape a pupil’s identity: the form in which they receive test results, the context within which these results are received, and the narrative which is created around their success or failure. We will then describe how these factors influence the goals pupils pursue when faced with a future of being tested.

Form

Consider these three ways of expressing the results of a test:

• Pass/fail - simply telling pupils whether they passed or failed, like a driving test.

• Label - framing performance on a scale through banding or categorising, such as telling pupils they ‘performed at greater depth’, ‘achieved a grade C’, or that their work was ‘level 4’.

• Rank - sharing scores in a way that ranks pupils, compares them to an average, or enables them to work out whether they did better or worse than everyone else who took the test, like a percentage or scaled score.

Now consider that the above approaches could all be applied to exactly the same test. Perhaps pupils sat a one-hour paper, produced an artefact, or wrote essay.

How pupils make meaning of the outcome of their efforts will depend both on what that outcome is (how they performed) and how it is conveyed to them.

The form in which results are conveyed may signal to pupils what the teacher (or the school or world more widely) believes about them - that they are a ‘failure’, exceeding or falling below expectations, or high/mediocre/low performing. Pupils can internalise the form so deeply that they even begin to describe themselves in these terms: “I am a level 4” or “I’m an epic failure at maths”. Younger children in particular will place a high value on what their teacher thinks of them.

The form also allows pupils to compare themselves against their peers, therefore defining themselves according to their relative performance. Teenagers are likely to place higher value on comparative success than on what the teacher may think of them. Brute ranking of scores makes this comparison stark, but teenagers will find ways of doing this anyway. Older pupils in particular will have a sense of where they place themselves in the class or against their social group. Their performance will either confirm this belief or contradict it, reinforcing or challenging their self-concept.

Finally, pupils may make meaning by measuring themselves against some internal standard. After Year 11 mock exams results are distributed, you will often hear comments like “I am happy with a grade 6” or “I really need to get a grade 5 to take this at A Level”. These comments illustrate that the pupil has determined in advance what good looks like for them.

Context

Meaning is constructed socially, by which we mean that how pupils make sense of test outcomes will be determined by context.

Imagine a pupil receives a test mark of 67% and that their only reference point for knowing whether this is a good or bad mark is the others in their class. Now imagine that the pupil is in a high performing class where the majority score in the 80-90% range. They will clearly be disappointed by their result. However, if the pupil found themselves to have achieved the best result in their class, the effect will be quite different.

It is this effect that leads pupils to say that they would rather be at the top of set 2 in maths than at the bottom of set 1. They know that it is not so much how well they perform, but how they feel about this performance as a result of the performance of those around them.

The culture within a school and classroom can also affect the extent to which social comparisons are internalised by pupils. In toxic cultures you may hear terms like ‘try hard’ used to label those who outperform the class, or ‘special’ for those at the other end of the attainment range. Pupils may self-label as a defensive tactic. These cultural norms can reinforce a fixed-trait fallacy where pupils believe they are destined to be either high or low performing in a subject. This can make high-performers complacent or low-performers despairing. Such beliefs can affect subject and career aspirations, even expectations of future wellbeing, earning potential, and status.

Narratives

Teachers and school leaders create narratives around academic success which shape pupils’ self-concept.

Firstly, there are narratives of morality and goodness. Whether we mean to or not, educators equate success at school with moral worth. Success is attributed to hard work, those that do well in assessments receive warm words and smiles, and we reinforce at every opportunity the correlation between success at school and the chance of a fulfilling, socially valuable life. There are good intentions behind these narratives, but if we are not careful they can be interpreted by those who find learning harder or have greater barriers to academic success as reflecting their innate worth and value to the world.

Secondly, there are narratives about future prospects. It is true that a illiteracy is disproportionally high in the prison population; there is a link between academic credentials and lifetime income on average; and conscientiousness is a trait prized in many vocations. However, to overplay the link between success at school and the possibility of a good life can be counterproductive in keeping pupils engaged.

Goal-orientation

Over time, the micro-exposures of assessment shape pupils’ self-concept, which in turn affect their expectations of future success. We can observe the effect of this in their goal orientation.

According to achievement goal theory, pupils may either adopt a mastery or performance orientation towards assessment.

Mastery goals are characterised by the desire to master the curriculum and become expert in a field of study. Those driven by mastery goals are intrinsically motivated and judge their success by how comprehensively they understand a domain of study. To these pupils, their performance in assessments matters only to the extent that they can better understand how to move forward.

Performance goals place performance as the end in itself. Those driven by performance goals will pay careful attention to comparative measures. To these pupils, what they achieve in a test, not what it tells them about their mastery of the curriculum, is what matters. This performative attitude can either lead to behaviours that are intended to improve test performance (in a pragmatic and even utilitarian way) or, where there has been repeated ‘failure’, to avoidant behaviours such as deliberately throwing the test, refusing to complete the test, or absence when a test is to be taken.

We can think of these orientations as ways in which pupils choose to play our assessment game. In Gordan Stobart’s ‘Testing Times’ (2008), he relays a story first printed in the Irish Times of a girl called Ruth who scored the maximum marks on the national Leaving certificate. Ruth revealed the secrets to her success, which were to choose the subjects she found easiest, learn the ‘formula’ for each exam, practise test questions relentlessly, and ignore content that was not likely to be in the test.

“I chose not to fight the system but to play with it. I did what I had to do to achieve my goals, I played the game, if you will.” (Ruth Borland in The Irish Times, 27 September 2005)

Whilst we may portray Ruth’s attitude as cynically instrumental, we can also see it as a smart response to the game we invited her to play. We might also empathise with the less celebrated pupils who might say “It was a game I couldn’t win, so I stopped playing”.

Mastery orientation is a game against oneself, not against others or against the system. We may like pupils to choose to play this game but is it the game our assessment system has created? What does it mean to win our assessment game?

When it comes to assessment, teachers and school leaders are the game designers. If some pupils repeatedly lose, we should not be surprised when they internalise a loser identity and behave accordingly. Equally, if test performance becomes the goal, we should not be surprised that savvy pupils focus on mastering the rules, not the content of the curriculum. Our assessments have consequences for how pupils perceive themselves and what they expect the future to hold for them.