In the recent years, there have been emerging ideas where implementing tests make a better way to evaluate young students, as compared to conducting continual assessment. I agree with this stance, since tests are proven to map children’s skills more efficiently, and also helps teachers to design targeted improvement program, which overall will accelerate the children’s skill development.
In common practice, tests generally included a series of questions or tasks that reflect the summary of studies. When a student is unable to answer the given questions, it gives signal to the examiners that the students’ level of understanding on particular topics are not adequate enough. For example, in a math test, more than 50% of the students are unable to answer pythagoras questions. Therefore, teachers can easily know the struggles faced by students based on the test performances. Unlike continous assessment, teachers do not required a long period of time to understand children’s strength and weakness. This indicates that applying tests as an evaluate measurement is effective and efficient, as it only take a few hours for teachers to get the general outlook of their students’ capacity.
Moreover, after receiving the test results, teacher can use the report as a reference basis to design tailored improvement programs for each of the student. Nowadays, with the assistance of artificial intelligence technology, the test result report can be interpreted in visual data formats. This made teacher easier to read the individuals’ skill profile, enabling the teachers to adjust their teaching methods based on each child’s capabilities. Such objective benefits can’t be obtained by continous assessment, since this method is outdated and taking a long time to complete.
In conclusion, I believe applying test sessions is a better way to evaluate student’s skills, as it is proven to be more efficient in its implementation by delivering a faster and specified test results, as compared to the previous assessment method.