Teachers say testing is taking too much time out of students’ classroom learning

Teachers want “more time teaching” and “less on Excel sheets” with many furious this “ridiculous” obsession is disrupting students’ classroom learning.

Teachers are being driven out of the classroom by a “ridiculous” obsession with testing students.

New research from the Australian Catholic University (ACU) has revealed that increased testing and teaching pupils with the aim of performing highly on assessments is sending students through school with superficial learning that lacks attention to their academic and social needs.

Dozens of school staff lashed the amount of time that formal and informal assessments – including standardised tests and classroom-based testing of reading, writing and maths before and after a concept is taught – took out of class.

They said it forced them to consider quitting teaching altogether because the workload involved in collecting “so much data” of which only a fraction was used for student feedback was unnecessary.

One teacher said: “It puts a lot of stress on me … to the point where I’ve actually considered not being a teacher, because the workload is just ridiculous”.

Another said: Testing takes so much teaching time. Why do we need so much data? More time teaching, less on Excel data sheets”.

Dozens of school staff lashed the amount of time that formal and informal assessments took out of class.

Testing measures can include a school’s internal testing of primary students across multiple year levels, and more formalised approaches in secondary school such as School Assessed Coursework (SACs) and examinations that contribute to a student’s VCE results.

Student data collection can also mean the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD), which tracks the number of students in each state that requires school disability funding.

Researcher Dr Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua said teachers believed class time was being “wasted” on repeatedly trying to quantify students’ progress both before and after they have learned a concept by frequently conducting maths tests, writing tasks and reading assessments where results had to be recorded.

Dr Daliri-Ngametua said that they faced time pressures and increased workloads by having to deliver “narrow, quantified, reductive measures of performance” that ate into time that could be spent on students’ learning.

“Ultimately, their discouragement stemmed from their belief that valuable time was being wasted,” she said.

“Teachers expressed a turmoil between the assessment data practices they were asked to engage in, and the actual benefit or value of those practices.”

Independent Education Union Victoria Tasmania general secretary Deb James said while data insights into students were important, they took up “disproportionate” amounts of teachers’ time.

It comes after the Herald Sun revealed in July that one in five Victorian teachers leaves the classroom within five years of graduating.

A new agreement for Victorian teachers has carved out time for class planning and assessment.

But Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Meredith Peace said: “There is too much emphasis and priority on gathering and analysing data through conducting a variety of assessments, including NAPLAN, in schools.

“This devalues the judgement of teachers and the ongoing assessment they do every day in their classrooms to monitor student progress and inform their practice”.