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Goal Testing (Turkey)
Get educators the assessment data they need to understand students’ skills, determine learning needs and improve English-language instruction.
TOEFL Primary®, TOEFL Junior® and TOEFL ITP® tests
Using TOEFL® test data about students developing English-language skills, schools have adjusted their instructional and professional learning programs. This has led to more customized lessons and improved student learning.
How TOEFL® Test Data Is Helping Educators
in Turkey Adjust English-language
Instruction to Meet Students’ Needs
Goal Testing uses the TOEFL Young Students Series and TOEFL ITP tests as essential educational tools: teachers use assessment data to understand students’ English-language skills — and to cultivate best practices to move their learning forward.
Remzi Canarslan, Founder and Managing Director of Goal Testing in Turkey, is a knowledgeable and avid proponent of research-based, standardized testing. As early as 2006, his company developed its own assessments for schools, with a goal of helping educators use assessment data to understand student skills, deduce students’ ongoing learning needs and improve English-language instruction.
“Turkey is a testing country,” he explained, pointing to the fact that Turkish schools have long used an 8th-grade assessment for students applying to high schools and a 12th-grade assessment for those applying to colleges. But a problem Canarslan ultimately saw with many available tests at that time — including his
own — “was they were not research-based, they were not standardized.” And thus, they could not provide “trustable data for schools.”
Around 2013, research on the matter led Canarslan to ETS, where he learned about the TOEFL ITP tests (for students age 16+) and the recently launched TOEFL Young Students Series — which includes the TOEFL Primary tests (for students age 8+) and TOEFL Junior tests (for students age 11+). He also learned about the value of research-based, standardized tests that produce the same reliable results for students around the world.
The exploration showed Canarslan why “it’s not an easy process to create a standardized test,” he said. “So I reshaped my business.” He transformed the enterprise into what is now Goal Testing, and he determined the new business would only offer schools “these trusted assessment tools that are acceptable all over the world. I wanted to focus just on TOEFL business.”
