Lanting Xu

K-12 World Languages Department Head, The American School in London, London, UK

We started implementing the Avant STAMP test in all of our language classes in 2011. The results that we learned from the data have been extremely helpful in terms of reshaping, modifying and changing our curriculum from middle school all the way to high school.

I fully understand that sometimes teachers feel that their curriculum time is extremely tight, why should I allocate two class periods for this test that is administered externally and how my students are going to perform is out of our control. I think that is precisely the reason that schools need to consider taking Avant’s assessments. Because they are external tests, they don’t have those kinds of teacher bias, because as teachers we tend to design test questions that will confirm our impression about students ability. We tend to design the questions that we know students are going to perform well on. So those kinds of teacher generated questions although very good may not be very accurately reflective of our students actual proficiency level.