Opinion

To the point - Wrong time to test

Policy & Politics
Testing a young child is like pulling a seedling out of the soil to check whether it is growing a good root system, says Nancy Stewart

You won't see the plant in its natural healthy condition, and you cause harm.

Formal testing and young children are such a bad combination that it is deeply worrying the Government reportedly intends to introduce compulsory tests for four-year-olds. This 'baseline' on entry to Reception will give useless information, and potentially be damaging.

Tests with closed answers cannot uncover a child's thinking and so are unreliable guides to how well children are learning and making sense of their world. One young child was marked as wrong on a language test when he looked at a picture of a rainy street scene and failed to 'correctly' complete the sentence: 'It's raining, so the people are getting ...' The required answer was 'wet', but the child said, 'No, they're not. Some have their umbrellas up.' Another lost marks for sorting farm animals into carefully mixed groups of 'friends' in fields, rather than the expected matched sets.

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