The purpose of testing should be to boost learner agency and efficacy. Unfortunately, many tests actually have the opposite effect, increasing stress in ways that undermine both agency and efficacy.
When administered in a thoughtful way, testing can serve as a feedback loop that enables learners to make (agential) decisions about how they want to grow, what they can do to grow and how they can measure their growth progress. When things go wrong, testing can humiliate learners into states of angst, ennui and resignation.
The USA’s presidential fitness test illustrates how testing can have the opposite of the desired effect.
According to Gretchen Reynolds:
‘By the early 1990s, exercise scientists were beginning to doubt the usefulness of the presidential fitness test, said Russell Pate, a professor of exercise science and director of the Children’s Physical Activity Research Group at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “By then, research was accumulating that demonstrated the important health impacts of physical activity.”
But the presidential fitness test wasn’t measuring fitness as it related to health or offering advice to parents, teachers or students about how children could improve their fitness and become healthier, Pate said. “There was no follow-up education.”
It also wasn’t reducing childhood obesity or inactivity, Going said, since both were rising precipitously throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
“What was it doing?” he asked. “Mostly making a lot of kids really want to skip gym class.”’
(adapted from “Kids hated the presidential fitness test. Researchers aren’t fans, either.” by Gretchen Reynolds in the Washington Post)
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Most testing goes wrong right from the starting line by inducing learners to think in terms of subtraction (deficiency) rather than addition (sufficiency) of knowledge. How many people do you know who tell stories about how their parents got angry at them for scoring 98 rather than 100 on a test. I see this as a form of neuroticism driven by deficiency thinking that induces needless suffering rather than learning agency.
Though I didn’t do well in schools where deficiency testing is the norm, I found out that I thrive and often learn more quickly than others when I am able to create a formula for planning and measuring increases in my personal sufficiency.
When I started studying kanji about 35 years ago, I learned how to turn the subtraction calculus on its head. Most people give up on studying kanji because they inevitably (at least temporarily) forget many of the kanji they have studied. I realized quickly that this was exactly the wrong way to look at things. If I studied 10 kanji and remembered 3, I knew 3 more kanji than I had known the previous day. I realized that if I repeated this pattern for two years, I would learn 2000 characters. There was never a subtraction of knowledge – only addition.
I called this approach “plus one thinking” and contrasted it with the “minus one thinking” that pervades most testing. When I focused on evidence of my increasing sufficiency rather than my inherited sense of deficiency, it became easy for me to CHOOSE to study more and search for more effective ways to learn.
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AGENCY (主体性) + PURPOSE (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = MEANING (意義)
Link to Washington Post article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/08/10/presidential-fitness-test-memories-science
© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.