I just watched a news report about state testing taking place next week in Mississippi, and how schools are going to great lengths to prep students for the exams. Now, these tests were for elementary schools, but I see the same things sometimes in high school (preparation for the ACT, SAT, et cetera).
So my question is, do you think too much emphasis is put on “teaching for the test”? Are schools losing valuable teaching time by concentrating so much on standardized tests, or does this focus justify itself by actually improving students’ skills?
This is a problem which educators continually wrestle with. Not so much for the ACT and SAT tests, but for the standardized tests that are thrust upon the schools by well-meaning state legislatures and school boards. For example, a state may come up with tests to be taken each year by 2nd, 5th, 8th and 12th grades. The results for each school are tracked from year to year to determine if the schools are improving or declining.
In theory, it’s a good thing to measure performance by students and check for improvement from year to year. However, when school district funding and ultimately the teacher’s job are tied to the test results, guess what the teacher is going to emphasize.
Unfortunately, in my oh-so-humble opinion, the No Child Left Behind act has definitely shifted emphasis from actual learning to learning to pass tests. I won’t get into it too terribly much, lest someone smack me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and send me to the Pit, but the whole culture of testing is whacked.
My daughter is a bright kid who normally doesn’t suffer from test anxiety of any kind. Now, she’s in eighth grade, and the Constitution test is required for eighth-graders (and I can’t blame NCLB for this one, since the requirement was in place when I was a kid.) At any rate, her history teacher pre-tested the kids, went over things that would be on the test over and over again, and continually stressed the importance of this particular test for three weeks prior to the test itself. My kid came home a few days before the test losing her MIND. “Mom, if I don’t get at least a C on this test, I can’t graduate!” I asked her, “Have you EVER gotten a grade below a B on ANY test, EVER?” “Um, no…” Despite that, she really stressed a lot. In the end, she got 100%, but she would have passed easily without all the classroom pre-test stuff. The sad thing is, this is an honors history class, and these kids spent three solid weeks preparing for one multiple choice test - and not learning anything else in the meantime.
Sorry. Had to vent there a bit. As a high school teacher, I can say with no doubt that is so. We no longer educate…now we are expected to pour answers into the kids, and try to fit “education” in around the edges. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
Sorry again…we just finished state testing here in California, and I am still miffed at the days lost to testing.
I agree with silenus, but from the student perspective. I went to HS in PA where we have the PSSA (Pennsylvania State School Assessment, or something like that) which fulfilled our state’s need to test, test, test! As its name implies, it was supposed to be an assessment of the schools rather than the students, but they screwed around with that for a while (They were considering indicating a student’s score on his/her HS diploma). As a result of which, we would spend weeks in preparation for the tests, learning how to do the math problems and how to respond to the literary prompts.
By my Jr year there was actually a book produced by the PA Gov. that taught you how to take the test.
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, given that it was essentially a watered-down version of the SATs and was thusly superfluous. IE, I don’t see why they couldn’t have used SAT scores to “judge” a school instead of wasting everyone’s time with a school-wide test.
School money and funding is now directly tied to test scores. Furthermore, the state and federal governments will punish nonperforming schools by withdrawing funding. If we can raise test scores – by any means necessary – we must. The districts and administrators are absolutely primates about this.
So we teach to the test, because who wants to get fired?
it would help if the tests actually tested worthwhile knowledge. from what i can tell of the california star tests, they’re designed to keep crappy publisher’s textbooks in adoption…
Naive question here-- why can’t the test material and even the test format be a total and complete surprise every time? That way the students’ actual knowlege would be tested–not just their knowlege of tests.
The material does change a little, from test to test (at least in PA). IE, the writing prompts are slightly different, though the type of essays remain the same (persuasive, explanatory, etc…*)
And if the format were completely dynamic the school would have no way to prepare students for the test (which would lower scores, which would lower funding, which could/would lower future scores…ad nauseum).
Also, keeping the format constant from year to year allows for a more accurate comparison to other years/school districts.
My Sr. year, a friend of mine borrowed a theme from the Simpsons for his persuasive essay on the PSSA test - “Mating should be mandatory once every 7 years”. Incidentally, he scored very well in the writing section…
I don’t understand why teachers shouldn’t teach for the test. After all isn’t the test testing what the students were supposed to have learned in that year? If a teacher teaches solely for the test the students should still be educated.
The problem with learning only for the test is that you don’t retain the material very well afterwards, as most people who have crammed for an exam will attest. Maybe if it’s a course you just have to get through, don’t care about, and will never need again, then you can do that. But if you’re trying to learn something properly, you have to understand it. And teachers who simply feed data into their students, to have them spit it back out onto a test paper, aren’t helping the kids understand a whole lot. But I know that teachers don’t have it easy, because the funding for their schools is often tied to the test scores, and the administration can get on their backs to push for “teaching for the test”. I have great respect for teachers who manage to educate their students, despite all that pressure.
But personally, I’ve always been insulted when I ask a teacher a question about the material, maybe going a little deeper into it to learn the “why” behind it, and I get “It’s not important, you won’t need that for the exam.” I’m at school to learn, but when I show a glimmer of intelligence, evidence that maybe I’m actually grasping concepts instead of memorizing a textbook, I’m often ignored.
Then again, maybe the teachers sidestep my questions to avoid frightening the students who are frantically writing every word down to memorize. You know, the “will this be on the exam” people.
A few years ago our neighbor was a school teacher in the houston independent school district. Her only duties at this particular school was to teach the TASS(now known as TAKS ) tests.
She always considered it teaching cheating, not knowlege. According to her the TASS test was meant to gauge the progress of the students and assess the effectiveness of the schools AND/OR the quality of the curriculum.
According to her all she accomplished was to falsely inflate the scores to assure the school retained an exemplary status. BTW her OWN merit raises and promotions were directly based on how the TASS scores came out.
I remember having what we called achievement tests when I was in school, so this really isn’t anything new. I don’t remember having classes that were designed strictly to pass them though.