TEACHING EXAMINATIONS.

We now come to a closing inquiry respecting the use of examinations for teaching purposes, i. e., examinations instituted for the one purpose of aiding and improving instruction and study. To distinguish an examination held for such a purpose from the promotion examination, we designate it a teaching examination.

It is not assumed in this distinction that promotion examinations do not also influence teaching and study, or that this may not be in the mind of the examiner. Too much space has already been devoted to a consideration of their evil influence in these directions to permit such an assumption here. In a certain sense even promotion examinations may be regarded as an element of teaching; but we are now to consider the use and value of the examination when completely divorced from promotion and used solely as an element of teaching.

As a further preliminary to the inquiry before us it seems proper to observe that the chief argument used by the advocates of promotion examinations is their assumed utility as a means of improving teaching and study. One advocate insists that they are needed as "a guide and spur to school work;" another that they are needed "to disclose to teachers and pupils alike their actual success," and still another that they are needed as “a means of self-knowledge to teacher and pupil.”

On the other hand, the value of the test as an aid to teaching and study is conceded by the most extreme opponents of examinations when used as a basis of promotion, rank, honors, etc. In his trenchant paper on the "Sacrifice of Education to Examination," Frederick Harrison, of England, says:

I do not deny that teachers may usefully examine their own students as a help to their own teaching. Examination, like so many other things, is useful so long as it is spontaneous, occasional, simple. Its mischief begins when it grows to be organized into a trade.

It is hoped that it may appear as we proceed that all the beneficial results claimed can be best secured by examinations instituted and used solely for teaching purposes. It will certainly be made clear that the disuse of promotion examinations does not involve in any degree the disuse of tests, oral or written.

THE TEST A TEACHING PROCESS.

The first fact to be noted in our inquiry is that the test is one of three cardinal teaching processes. Its immediate purpose is to disclose the results of instruction and drill-the other teaching processes-and also of study, the pupil's effort. This disclosure of results is essential to all successful teaching, and this is especially true in secondary and elementary schools. It is not possible for the teacher to determine when to take a step in advance, or how best to. take it, if he is ignoraut of the results of the steps already taken. In disclosing what has been

done amiss it makes correction possible and at the same time suggests a way of avoiding a like mistake next time. It thus makes progress attainable and fruitful. The test is the eye and guide and inspirer of teaching.

The test is likewise helpful to the pupil. It discloses his mistakes, misconceptions, and ignorance, and thus appeals to his innate desire for knowledge and mastery, arousing interest, increasing attention, and adding energy and persistence to his efforts; and these are helps most needed by superficial pupils. The test is thus to a pupil a revealer, a guide, a spur and energizer, and a satisfaction.

TEST EXERCISES.

It is a source of regret that the utility and necessity of the searching test are so imperfectly recognized in the modern school. There has been a marked decline in the frequency and thoroughness of the oraltest exercise in our elementary schools, and especially in our grammar schools. Many schools have swung from the old extreme of all testing and drill, with little instruction, to the opposite extreme of all instruction and drill, with little accompanying testing; and it is believed that this change has been not a little due to the advent of the stated written examination. When this was made the decisive test, school exercises became largely lessons, and testing was given over to the evil day, called in the school calendar "examination day," the day when the teacher steps down and the superintendent or principal steps up as the trier of children's souls, as well as of their attainments.

It is true that the old test exercises or "recitations" (truly so called) were too frequently memoriter and text-bookish, searching too little the understanding, but they were often vigorous and telling. They necessitated study, such as it was, and they held the pupil to a face-to-face, if not a mind-to-mind, contest. No intelligent educator desires to see a return to the old "memory grind,” which, like the mills of the gods, ran slow, but ceaselessly. But what is greatly needed is the giving of a due place in school work to the searching oral test, following and attending vital instruction and drill, and disclosing the results actually attained. It is true that the formal test exercise has a comparatively small place in lower primary schools, but it has a place even there, and an increasing place as the classes pass up in the grades.

TEACHING TESTS NOT PERIODICAL.

This leads to the fact that it is not possible to make the teaching test a periodical or stated exercise. It must be used when there are results that need testing, and this is not a question of time but of acquisition. The test may often be made an immediate attendant of instruction and thus may be mingled with it, this being specially true in primary classes. When the subjects taught, admit of topical division, the more formal test may properly come at the close of each topic, and often as a sepa

rate exercise, called a review or examination. When several topics may naturally be grouped as a more general topic or subdivision, the formaltest exercise may properly reappear at the conclusion of the whole. Most branches of study admit of this natural division, and the formal test may be effectively used in passing from one division to another.

It is obvious that true teaching tests, whether incidental or formal, can not be made to conform to the demands of a time table or to any other mechanical device. The natural divisions of the several branches do not correspond to such equal time divisions as weeks, months, quarters, etc., and if there were such a correspondence it would not be possible for the different classes to reach the division lines on time, this being specially true in a system of schools employing many teachers of unlike ability and skill. This fact is increasingly recognized in school supervision. The stated weekly or monthly review, the stated monthly or quarterly examination, etc., belong to a period of school supervision which has been aptly characterized as the "mechanical phase,” a phase now happily disappearing.

It seems unnecessary to add that the holding of teaching examinations annually or semiannually is a blind perversion of their purpose. The attempt thus to secure wholesome, free, and fruitful teaching is much like the attempt to improve the sanitary condition of a city by putting all its citizens into hospital twice a year and examining and dosing them to find out who is likely to be sick during the next six months. This would inaugurate "system" and possibly magnify the sanitary officers, but it would only serve to make their quackery the more conspicuous. The time for the medical diagnosis is the appearance of disease symptoms, and this escapes a time schedule. The times for teaching tests are those occasions attending school instruction when there may be ignorance or failure that needs to be disclosed and known. Moreover, how little basis there is for the assumption that the semiannual examination actually discloses to the superintendent or principal any defects in teaching not already known. The only persons that really learn anything of school instruction from the stated examinations are the teachers who read the papers, and they pay dearly for the little which they actually learn. The assumption that a superintendent is endowed with such supernatural insight that he discerns errors in teaching in a mass of examination tables is one of those delusions that sometimes gives a mysterious dignity to the supervisory office. It is true that such wisdom may be assumed in the presence of "examination returns," but we have never seen a superintendent wise enough to extract teaching reforms from a mass of per cent. tables. The only purpose that can justify the annual or semiannual examination is its necessity to determine the fitness of pupils for promotion, and if it be not needed for this purpose it has no useful place in school adminstration. So far as its influence on teaching is concerned, experience shows that it is the source of many more mischiefs than reforms. The teach

ing test needs to accompany instruction in order that it may correct, vitalize, and otherwise improve. it.

THE WRITTEN TEST.

What has been said above of the teaching test in general is also true of the written test now so widely used in school training. As an aid to instruction and study it must attend them, throwing needed light upon defects as they occur, and thus securing needed improvement. The written test can not be divorced from instruction. It can not be given over to the principal or superintendent; it must also be used by the ' teacher, and chiefly by the teacher, as will be shown hereafter (p. 57). While the written test should have an important place in school work, it should not be permitted to take the place of the inspiring oral test. It may be wisely used to supplement the oral test in reviews and, to a limited extent, even in daily work; and it may be used with special advantage at the completion of a subdivision of a study, and also at the completion of a part of the course. Its use for these purposes may not only be kept in harmony with the freest and most rational teaching, but it may be made a valuable aid to such teaching. The writer once set forth the special advantages of the written test as an aid to teaching and study in these words:

"It is more impartial than the oral test, since it gives all the pupils in a class the same tests and an equal opportunity to meet them; its results are more tangible and reliable, especially to the pupil; it discloses more accurately the comparative progress of the different pupils-information of value to the teacher; it reveals more clearly defects in teaching and study, and thus assists in their correction; it emphasizes more distinctly the importance of accuracy and fullness in the expression of knowledge; it reveals more fully than the oral test the pupil's ability to express his knowledge correctly; it may be at least an equal test of the thought power or intelligence of pupils, since this result, in both methods, is dependent upon the nature of the tests; and, lastly, the results may be readily made a basis for further instruction or study."

But the written test has obvious limitations which forbid its being used as a universal test of school work. It fails most, perhaps, when used in testing skill, and especially when time is an important factor. All vocal and purely mental arts wholly escape the written test, and it affords only a partial test in such arts as writing and drawing, where rapidity and facility of execution are as important as accuracy. Skill is primarily manifested by doing, and hence skill in writing is tested by writing, drawing by drawing, reading by reading, singing by singing, etc. In all school arts the written test can only be used as supplementary to the oral test.

It is feared that the written test has not only been used too exclusively but that the written exercise in its various forms has too much

taken the place of the oral exercise in school work. The amount of written work required of young pupils in many schools has become a serious evil, one needing attention and correction. A keen observer need not remain long in schools that overuse the pen and pencil to observe the nervous condition of many pupils when preparing written work, and many thoughtful parents have observed with solicitude the nervous tension of their children without suspecting that it was caused by the excessive use of slate and pencil. It has been seriously proposed to exclude the slate and substitute paper in all grades, and this has ▸ already been done in many grammar schools, but this is only a partial remedy. The fact ever to be kept in mind is that the total energy that can be safely used by a child in pen or pencil work is limited.

THE TEACHER AS EXAMINER.

It seems well to note in this connection that the teaching test, whether oral or written, should be chiefly used by the teacher. In American colleges all tests are prepared by those who give the instruction, and the students' papers are read and graded by them. The same is true in nearly all academies and in many high schools; and a considerable number of colleges are now admitting students on the certificate of the preparatory schools. This shows a praiseworthy tendency to respect the work and judgment of teachers. The fact that in these higher schools the teacher is so universally the examiner of his own classes has greatly lessened the evils that would otherwise have resulted from the use of the written examination to determine the standing and rank of students, though such use of the written test has not been as exclusive or as general in the colleges as in the public schools. The examining of college classes by outside examiners would not only greatly increase overpressure, cramming, and their attending mischiefs, but it would lessen the efficiency of college instruction and lower the dignity of the professorial office. If college instruction, in spite of the system, still held to its high aims, it would soon be supplemented by the hireling coacher and crammer, as is so generally true in England. When the examination of pupils becomes an outside business, the high office of teacher may sink into the trade of preparing pupils for examinations.

*

All this leads to the important fact that whatever of testing may be needed to determine the proficiency of individual pupils should be done

* In the universities and other higher institutions of England the examinations are largely intrusted to a class of specialists, called "examiners," whose business is not to teach, but to test the teaching of others. This has called into existence another class of specialists, called the “ crammers," whose business is not to teach or test teaching, but to prepare students to pass tests. When the teacher and the crammer are united in one person, the degradation of the teacher's office is complete. In 1877 the writer visited the normal school of Edinburgh, Scotland. He found the teachers preparing for the inspector's examinations, to begin the next day-examinations based on a prescribed syllabus. It was the sorriest cramming he has ever seen in a school of higher grade!