As children, teachers and parents sprint, slink or stumble into the new school year, they also find themselves laboring once again in the shadow of standardized tests. That is a real shame, given that there are few indications that the multiple-choice format of a typical test, in which students are quizzed on the specific formulas and bits of information they have memorized that year, actually measures what we need to know about children’s education.
There is also scant evidence that these tests encourage teachers to become better at helping individual children; in fact, some studies show that the tests protect bad teachers by hiding their lack of skill behind narrow goals and rigid scripts. And there are hardly any data to suggest that punishing schools with low test scores and rewarding schools with high ones improves anything. The only notable feature of our current approach is that these tests are relatively easy to administer to every child in every school, easy to score and easy to understand. But expediency should not be our main priority when it comes to schools.
Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.
When I was a high school student who knew at the time I was going to college to major in history and political science (and subsequently did), I never once on any standardized test I took (either the state level ones or the SAT/ACT), ever saw one question that had to do with history or political science. I was always hacked off by that because my academic scholarship for college was tied directly to how I did on those tests, even though they had not tested me in any way on the fields I knew I was going into.
That having been said, I am of mixed mind of standardized tests. In a lot of ways, I find them best described in the way that someone once described the American economic system, “It’s the worst possible system in the world…except for every other system.” While I think the standardized test system is seriously flawed, I don’t know what else to replace it with.
You can do some sort of pick n’ choose portfolio system, but that’s not really reliable either because there is no way to verify how much is actually the student’s actual work. Or, you can do no assessment at all and go back to some sort of individual college entrance exam, which can turn into a institutionalized razing ritual.
Personally, I think if they do a standardized test, they need to seriously enlarge it, and make it randomized. Giving different kids different tests at random. This would seem to enlarge the potential question pool where you don’t end up with teachers “teaching to the test.” I think such tests need to include civics, history, the arts, Latin, logic, and not just rote memorization of scientific equations and math problems.
To me, as the system is now, it is not really a test of what the kids know or what they are being taught, its a gauge of their memory skills, which does not really tell you much of anything in terms of creativity, original though, and being able to write a coherent paragraph. A test on how well they regurgitate what the teachers have spoon feed their memory banks seems to me to be pointless.
Must…fit…every…kid…into*umph*…this…box…we…made….*ugh*
Piaget? He’s probably an answer to some multiple-choice question even as we ignore what he discovered. Gardner? Fuhgeddaboutim.
I once annoyed my college psychology professor by defining “intelligence” as “the otherwise undefinable quality that is measured by intelligence tests.” What annoyed him was that he couldn’t come up with a better definition. Most standardized tests have a similar drawback–what the test directly measures is the ability to do well on the test. Any correlation between that ability and true knowledge and skill, much less wisdom, is taken on faith. The assumption that these tests measure a good education, or can indicate a good teacher or a good school, is similarly taken on faith. I have not seen much evidence that this faith is well-founded in reality.
What I have seen is that an education that focuses on maximizing test scores ignores academic and real-world skills that cannot readily be measured with an objective test, such as independent thinking or the ability to construct a coherent argument or even paragraph. I have also seen that reliance on “the test” reduces all of the subjects that are not on the test to second-class status, if indeed they can find [i]any[/i] place in the budgeted curriculum.
It is possible to develop standardized multiple choice tests that test logical thinking skills. There are some group intelligence tests that have such questions.
It is possible (and indeed common) to test reading comprehension (understanding) on a standardized test. Typically these items present the student with a short passage to read and then present a series of questions requiring the student to draw inferences and conclusions from the passage.
Basically, though, intelligence tests measure somewhat the same thing as achievement tests–i.e., previous learning–on the premise that the person who has learned well in the past will continue to learn well in the future, while the person who as not learned well in the past will continue not to learn well in the future. Intelligence tests (and achievement tests) also appear to measure socio-economic status.
In addition to the reasons stated in the article, standardized tests are “popular” with legislatures, state and national school boards and others wishing to evaluate schools, teachers and students because they are extensively lobbied by test developers who find the business extremely profitable.