The most critical issue facing modern societies is to find more effective methods for improving their education system.
Quality education is an investment in the future and there is no improvement in education more powerful than increasing the amount of feedback information to students, parents, teachers, school leaders, curriculum experts, and officials. Such feedback needs to not only outline the state of learning, the effectiveness of the curricula, the progression of students upwards through the education system, but also needs to assist those involved in education with enhancing the teaching and learning opportunities. We are primarily concerned with developing tools and applications to provide such feedback.
Rather than merely implementing a testing regime to collect performance data, we have started from the teacher and student perspective and developed easy-to-understand rich reporting that not only provides diagnostic but also formative information that has direct effects on teaching and learning. Such rich reporting, immediately available to teachers, students, parents and others is based on robust tests created by teachers on demand to fit the teaching that has occurred. Item calibration and the use of modern test theory means student progress can be benchmarked and evaluated over time.
Many countries have introduced state or national testing, which usually occurs once a year for selected age groups. Centralised tests offer little informative power to teachers. Teachers often then teach to these examinations and there is more emphasis on surface than deep learning. It is hard to find examples where the learning of students has increased from such testing regimes. Unsuccessful students begin to see school as not a place for them, and drop out reducing the level of education for those in most need.
asTTle provides countries with a complementary model. It allows teachers and students to create "just-in-time" tests tailored to what is being learnt/taught, provides immediate rich feedback about progress against the curriculum, allows comparisons to national normative data, provides individual profiles of strengths and gaps, indicates the level of achievements of students and classes, and recommends next learning/teaching based on this information.
It has been shown that the asTTle model can make major differences to how teachers make choices in their teaching, how students conceive of the quality of their learning, how parents can appreciate the progression of their children upwards through the education system, how schools are making progress towards targets, issues in the curriculum, and how the country is performing in the subjects being assessed.
The model emphasises the professional judgements of school leaders and teachers, while providing them and many others with the information about the success of these judgements.