by Sue Ellis, Professor of Education, Strathclyde University

THE debate on national assessments is getting heated. Parents are being urged to withdraw children from “harmful testing” amidst reports of children crying over their computers.

No-one benefits from partial information or scaremongering, so here are some arguments to start a less fractious, more fruitful, discussion.

First, the assessments are still in a developmental phase, which is why a review process is in place. There are technical issues around tempering the “game mentality” that prompts children to poke and swipe at a laptop screen, and around helping younger children master a mouse.

The development team could also better-contextualise some assessment items for Scotland and improve how quickly items become simpler or harder in response to answers.

Second, Scottish assessment is broader than the narrow “tests” in England or the United States. The literacy assessments indicate how easily children read continuous text rather than single words and how they make sense of their reading.

They indicate how well younger children understand a text when read to them, check they know common letter sounds and understand the vocabulary of teaching.

Alerting educators to misunderstandings after one year in school makes sense. Mostly teachers notice these things, but people make mistakes.

Education can learn from other professions. When medics introduced pre-operative “checklists”, they found post-operative complications dropped dramatically. Are teachers different from surgeons?

In Scotland, professional judgments, not raw test scores, decide children’s attainment levels. Standardised assessments are a tool to moderate such judgments across the country; letting educators check their judgments is neither overly-optimistic nor overly-harsh.

The First Minister wants to close the attainment gap between rich and poor. It is neither moral nor smart to wait until children sit external exams aged 16 to discover whether the system has delivered.

Also, Scottish policy is premised on scaling-up successful reforms. We need a common measure to judge what works, in which contexts to direct taxpayers’ money, and teachers’ and children’s efforts wisely.

Maybe the real concerns are less about standardised assessments and more that poorly scrutinised raw results could be used inappropriately to set targets and create school “league tables”.

Ireland removed school assessment results from Freedom of Information legislation to prevent such data use. In Scotland, teachers choose when children sit assessments, making it harder for data to be used to stratify, rather than help, children.

We do need an urgent debate about the ethics of data use, one that includes the unions, media, charities, local authorities and Education Scotland, alongside parents, teachers, children and politicians. It should highlight the pitfalls of target-setting and abolish unethical practices.

National guidance on responding to standardised assessments, and better data-literacy as a result of using them, should stop this happening.

Standardised scores are just data, neither good nor bad. They undoubtedly improve on narrow, locally-devised “tests”, which have dubious merit.

Providing a free, well-designed assessment for everyone seems a good idea. We should focus on the actual issues and drain the mix of entrenched ideology and politics from the discussion.