I have often heard complaints that teachers are saddled with so many requirements w.r.t. students having to pass various standardized tests, that teachers can’t “really teach” anymore and have to “teach to the test” or (as some others put it) “teach them how to pass the test.”
But why is this bad?
I would expect that if the test is well-made, then teaching a kid how to pass that test is “really teaching,” i.e., really is providing the kid with an education concerning the subject matter.
But the complaint I hear isn’t that the tests are bad tests. It’s that there is some kind of dilemma–generally, one can either really teach, or teach to the test. But why should there be such a dilemma?
Can a kid really pass a lot of these standardized tests (for example, the TAKS in Texas) without also knowing enough about the subject matter to be considered educated in it?
If the test is an adequate curriculum, then I see no reason why it’s bad. A big part of the opposition of teacher’s unions to “teaching to the test” is a reluctance to relinquish autonomy, posing as concern for the quality of teaching
I presume the teacher feels that they are not giving the student the fullest understanding of the underlying reasons why a particular answer may be correct.
In addition, a lot of standardized tests don’t allow the sort of freedom of question-style that might thoroughly test someone’s knowledge. For example, for ease of marking multiple-choice questions are a mainstay, when that’s not really a good way of testing anything but (maybe) straight factual knowledge.
As a personal matter (yeah, yeah), I find that teaching “to the test” can often involve not necessarily teaching what’s on the test, but test-writing skills. This is important (and limiting) for teachers whose performance is based on their kids’ standardised scores. My practice MCAT scores skyrocketed not when I really sat down and got into the material, but when I started getting into the groove of how to write that style of test.
Because even the best standardized test is still a standardized test, and there’s all sorts of things it isn’t good at testing. Anything that can’t be tested well in a multiple choice format and run through a machine, for example. It tends strongly to concentrate on testing for the rote memorization of unconnected facts, and not for any actual understanding of the subject. Like memorizing the dates of battles, but not why they were fought; the test concentrates on the easily quantified date, but not on what actually matters.
And because the tests don’t cover everything, but making them so important means that anything the test doesn’t cover gets crowded out. And because the memorize-and-regurgitate model of education tends to produce people who forget what they’ve learned not long after the test is over. People aren’t computers, and teaching them like computers doesn’t work very well.
Should we eliminate such tests? No; they are good at some things. But making them the be-all and end-all of education is a bad idea.
When I was going to school in Texas we took one of those generalized every once in a while. In 7th grade we just spent a few days before the test going over what was going to be one it, how to take it, etc. By the time I was in high school we were spending two weeks out of the year going over the test as were the middle schools (so it wasn’t just because the high school material was more extensive).
I think Der Trihs makes some excellent points. Rote memorization has it’s place in education, but, with that in mind, I think education should be about getting students to think rationally and for themselves. Teaching the test does not accomplish that goal.
A big reason schools have started to teach the test is because they’re funding may be affected by how well their students do on it. In a bizarre twist of fate schools that perform poorly may have some of their funding removed. Weird, eh?
The NYS ELA for 7th grade has a short answer section that often manages to be both brief and confusing. The problem with these tests is that they ask for skills that aren’t particularly relevant in real life. How many multiple choice tests have you had to take since leaving school? What you want to teach them to do is understand the construction of a story, the relevance of the themes, help them acquire new vocabulary, and then parlay that understanding into various types of writing or speaking tasks, etc. Of course, we do that anyway. What teachers resent, I think, is the time spent on building test taking skills that are only relevant for these specific, inauthentic tasks, and which will not really help them in real life. We have them practice taking old tests and then going over them, which takes up a lot of time, when we could be doing more interesting, relevant work.
Unless the class is Test Taking 101, “teaching to the test” is completely ass backwards and misses the point.
Presumably, there is a certain amount of subject matter the class is supposed to learn and master. The teacher’s main goal is to instill mastery over the subject matter in the students, and a lesser, secondary goal is to measure the amount of learning that actually took place, so as to assign individual grades. Testing is one way to measure how much each student learned. It is not the only way, and it is debatable at best whether it is even a very effective way of measuring subject mastery. The test is the teacher’s tool, to be changed and discarded whenever necessary. It seems like the modern perspective is that the test is the goal, and the teachers are simply there to facilitate the students passing it.
“Teaching to the test” is putting the saddle on the teacher’s back and giving the horse the reins.
In New York when I was in high school most subjects made you take a Regents exam at the end. This covered most of the material, and teaching to it was just covering the material the state wanted you to know, and was no problem. In the heavily tracked system I was in, it was assumed that those of us in Honors would get it, and we went well beyond the test.
The trouble with NCLB is that only a few subjects are tested, and teaching to those tests concentrates on math and English and leaves out history and science. That’s a big problem. Another problem is if there is a wide variety of abilities in one classroom. If the teacher and the district get rated on pass rates, a lot of effort will go to making sure those on the low end pass, with less effort actually educating those who are going to pass no matter what.
Also, to be correct on a multiple choice test you don’t necessarily need to know what the correct answer is as long as you know what the incorrect answers are so you can get a better score by gaming the answers to questions you do not know.
Because the teachers want to teach things that are different from the things that the people who make the test want them to teach.
Sometimes this may be laudable: there are indeed things that can’t be measured on a multiple-choice test, and they are indeed worth teaching. But those things are also more satisfying and just plain fun to teach, from the teacher’s point of view. Nobody goes into teaching to help students memorize facts; we like to imagine we are opening minds or expanding horizons or somesuch, and making sure Johnny knows the rules of grammar is dull and tedious grunt work. It’s much more fun to ask them what they think about a short story, or have them write a poem.
It’s also true that some things are much harder to measure, and so a bad and lazy teacher who knows he or she is bad and lazy has a natural incentive to prefer teaching things that can’t be measured (hence his bad laziness be demonstrated).
And finally, some people just plain think different things should be taught: see **Voyager’s **post for one example. I tend to think that History and Science are important, too; but at the same time, I think that in a public (i.e. government-run-and-funded) school, the people via their elected leaders have the right to overrule the teachers about what should be taught.
In college, I loved TA’s who taught to the test. And full professors who didn’t.
Because the full professors, who usually wrote the book the class was based on, knew the material by heart and had a love for it. And the TA’s would have been partial to their own previous study books and want to teach different material.
You say that as though a reluctance to relinquish autonomy is contradictory to concern for the quality of teaching.
Teaching is something of an art form. You have to consider the following things:
-What unique skills do you bring, skills that will help you hold the attention of kids who are not naturally academic? For me, this is my vast repertoire of awesome zoological facts, plus my magic tricks, plus my storytelling. For another teacher at my grade level, it’s her skills with crafts, her quick empathy with students, her ability to imagine on a child’s level. Another teacher on the hall could play guitar as part of a phonics lesson; another one has got some scary-ass disciplinary mojo going on. You cannot standardize a curriculum such that it requires any one of these sets of skills, nor would you want to: the variety of skillsets means that the principal can match students to the appropriate teacher.
-How do you reach that kid who’s struggling? A single curriculum won’t do it. One girl needed the space to be able to struggle with a difficult (for her) Pokemon book: letting her read that during reading workshop was, I think, the only thing that enabled her to pass the grade. Another kid needed constant conversations at lunchtime about his behavior, along with a chart at the beginning of each day on which he could post his goals for the day. A teacher must develop strategies unique to each struggling child, because each struggling child is unique.
-How do you reach that kid who’s really advanced? Fairly similar to the struggling kids, except a little easier.
Teachers need autonomy to put their own skills to fullest use, and to meet the needs of the individuals in their class.
As to the test, there are some good ways to teach to a test, I think. Our school uses a book called Test Talk, a book that teaches certain metacognitive skills such as inference and analogy by looking at test passages. The question is whether this is the best way to teach such skills.
I don’t think it is. Better to teach analogy through looking at analogies you’ll find in real literature; better to teach inference through authentic artifacts in which inferring is a necessary tool for comprehension. When you teach such skills using test passages as examples, kids will probably perform better on test passages; but when it comes to using those skills in the wild, they’ll probably not perform as well as if they’d learned the skills in the wild.
FWIW, the only “essay”-ish portion of testing in North Carolina in grades 3-5, I believe, was the 4th-grade writing test–and that’s been done away with in favor of a portfolio. All the tests are multiple choice.
Bingo. furt mentioned that the people have a right to determine what’s important, and I agree. Thing is, I’m one of the people, and I’d really like our elected representatives to fix the no-social-studies, little-science aspect of NCLB. I suspect most people don’t realize exactly how neglected these areas are; and in today’s economy, neglecting scientific education is an insane recipe for relegating our country to irrelevancy. We (the people) need to fix this.
The law’s name is a big hint to another problem, as Voyager points out. It’s not “Every Child’s Maximum Potential,” it’s “No Child Left Behind.” If we can achieve the mythical state where every child performs at grade level, the law considers it a success, and screw the high-academic kids who could have gone on to great things. There’s tremendous pressure to devote all one’s time to the kids for whom school is a difficult environment, explicitly at the expense of the students who thrive in school. Again, that’s an insane recipe for the future of our country: when you neglect your best and brightest, at bets you’ll be a country of mediocrity. We need to fix that.
Are you suggesting that the question failed to test for knowledge of the subject matter? It looks to me like you (imaginary you, anyway) got it right precisely because of your knowledge of the subject matter. You knew what brains do, what stomachs do and what lungs do.
While not really disagreeing with most of what you said, part of the problem is that many people involved in education policy, as well as much of the electorate, are inclined to see elitism (and possibly racism) in education aimed for the highest achievers.
Ask anyone who teaches at the college level, and they’ll confirm what the dropout rates say: higher education admits tons of students who are not really capable of doing the work. And yet the last two politicians who got elected president did it while insisting that what we needed to do was get more people enrolled in college. It’s not true, but it’s what the voters and the education industry want.
