I’m putting this here because I’m just looking for thoughts and opinions, not debates about the merits or lack of merits of the tests. What do you think about standardized testing? I’m a certified teacher, I work as a day to day sub and I’m a mom. I can say without a doubt I absolutely hate this testing. I see how stressed out it gets my daughter (teenager) and I’ve seen how it stresses out administrators and teachers.
I think kids are over tested. They are benchmarked throughout the year, they are tested in each subject area throughout the year and are given state standardized tests in most grades.
Last year, my daughter had a concussion, missed a ton of time and then had anxiety about returning to school which led to more missed time. I opted her out of the tests. It was ridiculous because in my state, PA, the only opt out option is religious objections. I have no religious reason to object but that’s what I had to say even though I knew and the school district knew exactly why she was being opted out and it was a valid reason. Imo, I think as a parent, if I don’t want my child to take the tests, that should be a valid enough reason.
This year, she takes two tests in May, and she has already mentioned that she’s worried. i mentioned to my husband that I would consider opting her out which he thinks we should do. The thing is though, our state requires either proficiency on the tests or a culminating project if the student fails as a graduation requirement. I wonder if doing the projects is just as stressful. Honestly, it pisses me off. She gets good grades for the most part, takes a ton of quizzes and tests, hands in quality assignments and the school district and state are telling me it’s not good enough for her to graduate.
What are your thoughts about the tests, dopers? I’d love to hear from some teachers and parents have you ever opted your children out of the tests?
Which test? Administered to whom? For what purpose? There are some standardized tests that I love–I think the AP Econ tests, both of them, are lovely little jewels that test exactly what they are trying to test with efficiency and charm. On the other hand, I think the short-answer questions on our English End-of-Course here in Texas were graded with such inconsistency as to make them worse than invalid: they demanded teaching to a dumb formula so kids could shape an answer that was dumb-rubric foolproof. (they removed them this year, so I think that’s a sign the data backed up what was obvious to everyone).
Other tests are valuable for one thing but not the other–I think our end-of-course exams are generally pretty good at identifying if someone has the sorts of skills I’d expect a high school grad to have, but I don’t think they do a good job of distinguishing college-ready from not.
Some competitive tests, like the AIME, are really interesting challenges and I’m glad they exist. UIL number sense in TX is also a fascinating standardized test. Academic Decathlon, though, I’m not as sure I like–though it’s better some years than others.
I like the new SAT better than the old, because I think it’s getting at something more meaningful, but there’s still something intensely problematic about using what’s essentially a gamable system to determine who gets to go to the best schools. On the other hand, how else would a school with 50,000 applications and 3,000 slots possible narrow down the pool? And I also feel like some minority/first-generation kids need an objective way to show their skills because literally no one will believe they really “deserve” to be taken seriously if they don’t bring objective data. On yet another hand, I think they need to be evaluated along side other things–including other test data–and that people need to understand that when something’s been hacked into pieces with a machete, you can’t assign meaning to a millimeter.
I don’t like that these things stress kids out, but stress is the outcome of ambition, and ambition is good. Sports and social life are at least as bad.
I think good teachers assess and provide opportunities for students to self-assess constantly. But not everything has to be “graded” or contribute directly to the final grade. In fact, the longer I teach the more I let my classroom grades just inflate away because I just don’t care about them and everyone cheats if I do. I put my time into self-directed assessment/feedback systems and my students’ achievement on standardized assessments has gone through the roof. I think that’s more meaningful than kids meeting my local assessments, honestly.
I do wish teacher understood testing and assessment better than they do, generally. I’ve met very few who understood how to evaluate a test, and have had the weirdest conversations with people who just insisted that of an given test, a kid who could get 90% of the answers correct deserved an “A” and anything else was “giving away points”.
The problem I have with the testing, isn’t that it is standardized. It’s that it is always used incorrectly.
The only INTELLIGENT way to use test results, isn’t to reward or punish the children or the teachers. The INTELLIGENT way to use tests, is to find out what they learned, so that you can do follow on work, until they know what they need to know.
Sadly, the vast majority of Education administrators, don’t think like we repair technicians do. They don’t test people to correct their errors and make things work, they test things and people in order to decide who they can punish for the failures.
In my fantasy world, we wouldn’t have grades and terms, we’d have education that was constantly being checked and adjusted until the students knew the material.
Sorry, to be clearer I wasn’t referring to SATs or tests like that. I guess this would vary based on where you live. For example, in PA elementary grades take PSSAs in reading/writing, math and science. The high school kids take Keystone exams in Biology, Algebra, and English.
I would agree with this. It seems as though all the testing is done just to collect data when that data should be used to make improvements and to help kids learn.
Why on earth is she stressed? Is it something the school said? Is it something her friends believe? Is it something you taught her?
So that’s it there. The school is telling you she won’t graduate. Actually not standardization, or testing, or mandated standardized testing, the problem is your state/school graduation requirements. Or perhaps their teaching competency. Or even that they give dishonest feedback during the year.
At least standardized testing will give you some idea which of those it is.
I don’t know what it is, but a lot of the time when I see teachers condemning standardized testing, they fail to note that a lot of people aren’t teachers. So here it is: if your teachers are any bloody good, they will already know how good most of their students are. Standardized testing doesn’t help with teaching.
It can help with learning, which is why I’m generally in favour of standardized testing. It can help parents, students, schools, and sometimes even teachers learn things.
As a student, I always liked standardized testing. It gave me a second independent indicator of where I was. As a parent, I like standardized testing. It gives me a second independent indicator of where suburb is at. As a computer programmer, I like independent testing. It gives me a second independent indicator of the status of my projects. As a teacher, I like standardized testing. It gives me feedback about my
She’s stressed because it seems like the district stresses the tests a lot. No pun intended . I always tell her there will be things you know and things you don’t know, just do your best, no one can argue with that.
I agree that a good teacher shouldn’t stress over the results and I think there are two reasons that they do. One is that there’s been so much talk about tying student performance to pay, I’m not sure if that happened and that’s a discussion for another day. The other reason is because I think the administrators are freaked about performance so the teachers are feeling that. I don’t know why because overall our district scores well.
I hear what you are saying that it’s another indicator of how your kids are doing in comparison to other kids in the state. I think there are factors that can play on that though. For example, a bad test taker, a bad teacher, a child that just no matter how hard they try is not going to be proficient at science or a tested subject area, just testing on a bad day, you know you don’t feel well and so on.
Here the kids spent 70% of their school year prepping for and taking tests that grade the school system on how well it is doing, and about 30% of the time actually learning new content.
it seems silly and a waste of time.
When i was a kid, we took these things in grade school once a year called achievement tests, they were not prepped for or anything, you just took them, it showed where you placed in what areas. The teachers could use it to see where a kid might need extra support on something. It also had nothing to do with graduating high school.
otherwise all the teachers time was spent teaching current curriculum and as a kid that’s what you took tests on, and that’s what you got graded on, and that is what your graduating or not was based on.
How can the kids learn if they spend most of their time prepping to compete to make the school look good instead of learning new things?
I actually think standardized testing is a good idea, but the implementation has been poor, and frankly a lot of the pushback is from parents upset when it turns out little Johnny isn’t actually that good at math.
There really needs to be a more-or-less objective standard to compare students from school to school and district to district, if nothing else but to make sure that there’s a baseline of knowledge being taught everywhere. We’re definitely to the point that it’s possible to grade a test that is more than multiple-choice automatically (I know, because I work for a company that does just that) so really a lot of arguments against standardized testing are arguments against a particular test, not the concept itself.
A lot of schools probably hate it because it exposes that they aren’t doing a good job (but see more below). One of the advantages of No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top were finally pointing out that just because a state has set the bar so low you can fall over it, doesn’t mean that the students were getting a quality education. You have to know where the pain points are before you can fix them, right?
That gets into how they should and SHOULD NOT be used in teacher/school evaluation. The way I see them used is “well, Mrs. Smith had a 50% fail rate, we should fire Mrs. Smith”. Which is stupid, because you don’t know what Mrs. Smith had to work with. If the students in Mrs. Smith’s class had a 80% fail rate last year, Mrs. Smith deserves a raise. If the students in her class last year had a 20% fail rate, then yea, she should be fired, barring extraordinary circumstances. But just as a one-time, hey-they-failed-you-suck test, that is no bueno.
And last, I always see posts about “the teachers spend more time teaching to the test than actually teaching!” or “the results don’t match up with what little Susie really knows!”. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy these arguments at all. Sure, maybe a day or two is spent on testing techniques, but no teacher is spending 3 months on how to bubble in a scantron and ignoring the chemistry lesson. And in my experience, if little Susie failed the scantron, it’s because little Susie didn’t know the material. Notice how the kids jockeying for valedictorian rarely if ever fail those standardized tests? That’s because they know the material. Notice how the kids that are taking their junior year for the third time fail the standardized tests? That’s because they don’t know the material. Sure, one test is not perfect, there might be a standard deviation of a few percentage points either way, but it’s not THAT far off.
To sum up: standardized testing is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
But an inherent part of the concept of the test is the test itself, and if you are not willing or able to pay for a sensitive enough test, that’s a valid complaint.
The controversy is a lot more subtle that that. Most evaluation systems these days look at “value-added”–for each kid, you predict how much that kid “should” have grown, and you evaluate the teacher/school based on individuals meeting/exceeding those expectations. But how, exactly, you determine “expected growth” and what you count as “exceeding” that is complicated and introduces controversy.
Again, it’s a lot more subtle that that. Some teaching objectives are easier to assess than others, for purely practical reasons–for example, it’s pretty hard to assess if a kid can write a research paper. It’s easier to assess if they can revise and edit someone else’s, if they can select evidence to support a claim, and if they comprehend a short passage they read. So those are the things on the test. Now, if I have my kids write a research paper, they will probably be able to do all those other skills–they are part of the process. But I won’t spend as much time on them, because I’m also working in all these other things that go into writing a research paper. If, instead, I really drill into the three subordinate skills that are actually tested, my kids will do better and if they don’t, my ass will be covered because I can show I did cover those skills as discrete things. But at the end of the day, most kids probably would have been better off if they’d had to write at least one paper before they went to college.
Now, some tests are better than others about this. AP Macro, if you teach them exactly what they need to know on that test to get a 5, they will be more than well prepared for Intermediate Macro anywhere in this country. On the other hand, some tests actually punish you for teaching the broader skills–the Texas English I EOC short answers really did demand you avoid teaching certain things and force kids to a formula. Some tests are in the middle: I feel like I do a authentic job of teaching what should be taught in an AP English Language class, and it works well. But I’ve seen very superficial approaches that work just fine.
Past that, teaching explicit test taking skills is also really important. The medium does get in the way of kids being able to convey what they understand. In an extreme example, I had a kid who would read every single passage on a test before attempting to read any of the questions because he thought that was being a good, careful student. In reality, it meant he never even read half the questions and didn’t have a chance to express the reading skills he certainly had. Being comfortable with tests, understanding how they work, what they are trying to do, what they are really asking makes a huge difference in student performance. I spend at least 5% of my total class time in a year–maybe 10%–explicitly talking about or having kids practice multiple choice test-taking techniques, and another 5-10% of the year having kids take released free-response questions and assessing their own answers. Now, that’s high because within our program I’m designated as the “teach them how to take a test” person and I integrate SAT prep, but it’s not uncommon in every classroom.
We are not opting her out this year, I simply threw the idea out to my husband. We never said anything to her about it. I did opt her out last year because of a concussion and post concussion anxiety which caused her to miss four months of school.
This is what partially bothers me, too. A good education doesn’t teach to the test, but our district will spend several weeks doing prep, and by prep I mean spending every class period going over the types of questions that may show up on the test because they have shown up in previous years. It’s material the teachers haven’t had time to review or teach in the first place. Idk, but it seems like if they didn’t take so much time prepping for the test, there might be time to cover the material in the first place.
About “teaching to the test”-
There is teaching TO the test and there is teaching THE test. Teaching the test is where the teacher goes over the test, questions and answers, before the test is given. Yes, this used to occur quite frequently. Maybe it still does in some places. On standardized tests given today, a teacher can go to jail if he’s caught doing this. In Georgia, a teacher isn’t even allowed to READ the end-of-course test or answer any questions whatsoever during the test.
Teaching to the test is where a teacher teaches the subject in a way that allows students to be successful when they take the test. If the test is checking whether the students know what the great educational minds in the high ivory towers (of Pearson, probably) say they should know, teaching any other way is suicidal. How can one expect the students to excel on the test if the material on the test isn’t taught to them so that they can?
You didn’t see what she was dealing with and she did see a therapist. When my teenager is in tears, throwing up and hyperventilating, pushing her out door wasn’t an option to me.
Standardized testing has plenty of flaws, however, it is the fair and necessary thing because otherwise good students in tough schools might be penalized unfairly in the college-admissions process.
A good student in a tough, rigorous school might have a GPA of 3.2. A bad student in a lousy, easy school might have a GPA of 3.7.
Without standardized testing, that good student might suffer when it comes to gaining admission to college, since he appears, on the outside, to be 0.5 GPA points lousier than the bad student. But with standardized testing, the good student would probably significantly outscore the bad student, and thus properly shine on his merits.
Absent medical situations, students ideally shouldn’t be stressed about end of the year tests because they should have a pretty good idea of what they are going to get. If there are lots of surprises when the tests come in, something pretty wrong is going on.
I agree, although some people just naturally find test taking stressful and in her case she missed time with her concussion, anxiety issues after the concussion (it happened at school) and she had a bad case of mono.
. I always tell her there will be things you know and things you don’t know, just do your best, no one can argue with that.