Teachers' task demands, students' test expectations, and actual test content

Background: Previous studies on instructional importance show that individual students and their teachers differ in the topics that they consider important in the context of an upcoming teacher‐made test. Aims: This study aimed to examine whether such differences between students' test expectations and teachers' intended task demands can be explained by the actual test content. Samples: Participants were history teachers ( N =19) and their 11th‐grade students ( N =388). Method: Teachers and students rated the importance of text sections that would be tested in the near future. By means of multilevel analysis, ratings were compared with the occurrence of sections in the tests. Results: Although teachers considered a majority of sections as important and tested only a minority of the sections, their tests still included sections rated as unimportant. The number of such discrepancies, however, was relatively small. Sections the teachers rated important had a much higher probability of being included in the test than sections rated unimportant. For students, a similar but lower degree of correspondence between ratings and test content was found. Interestingly, for sections that teachers considered important, students more often gave a higher rating when these sections appeared in the test than when they did not. The same holds for sections that teachers considered unimportant. Conclusions: For both teachers and students there is a limited correspondence between perceived task demands and test content. Furthermore, students' perceptions of task demands show a compensation for some of the differences between their teachers' intended task demands and the test demands.