What's wrong with "teaching to the test"?

Great Debates
61

I’m just not sure why you think this indicates a problem with standardized testing. If the test these guys are going to take has questions like “Which button makes the font bold?” and “Where is the ‘paragraph’ menu selection” then yeah, that’s pretty bad, but specifically, it’s a bad test. A much better test–still just as standardized–would involve tasks like “Reformat this block of texts so that its paragraphs are tabbed correctly” and “Some words in this block of text have been partially bolded. Fully bold them.”

That’d be a standardized test that there’d be nothing wrong with “teaching to”.

If a test is best passed through rote memorization without comprehension, then yeah, it’s a bad test. But that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with teaching to the test in general. It just means you need to make sure the test in question is a good one–and I’ve held that to be so all along in this thread.

62

Could you expand on this?

I don’t see sentence diagramming in there anywhere. I see a variety of grammar topics, but none of them necessarily involve giving students an appreciation for grammar as a logical system.

63

I’m not a teacher, but the girlfriend is, 3rd grade, we talk about it quite a bit because it drives her nuts and I find it interesting.

Her beefs with the standardized mandated tests.

  1. By the end of the year they expect all of her students to be at grade level, thats tough since a lot of them she gets are already quite a few years behind. She feels that if she advances that student one full year, she’s done her job, and she feels hindered, or at least the kids are cheated by trying to advance 2 or more years in a single year, trying to cram all that in can lead to less than a years progress. Also not helping here is that the school can’t just hold a kid back, they can recommend it, but its ultimately the parents decision, so she gets to not teach the ones that get it and could learn more and deal with the one that likes to lick the walls and should have never made it out of first grade.

  2. Too many damn tests. They’ve been in school for 7 days now and already lost 2 days to beginning of the year tests. They throw a few more time wasters in there before the BIG ONE.

  3. The big test itself, it wastes about 2 weeks of classroom work. Then all the rules, for a week or so prior and during the 2 weeks of testing you can’t teach anything that might be on the test. At least this past year they did them toward the end of the year, they used to do them in February.

  4. The way the tests are weighted and scored for each school. I’m not sure what the #'s are, but if you have a group that isn’t big enough, % or qty, not sure, then that group doesn’t count towards the schools score. So if your school happens to have very few “special” children, then their scores don’t count, and the school gets more money. If the school has a large “special” population, it counts and the scores are dragged into the dirt and the school gets less money to deal with large amounts of “special” children, and the teachers get even more paperwork to do, which gives them even less time to teach. Creative and possibly dishonest shuffling of different groups can help a school out tremedously.

  5. The amount of money that goes into these tests, money that could and should be spent in the classroom and on more teachers. In this district there is one administrative employee working in the down town office for every 3 teachers. That # doesn’t include the administrative folks actually in the schools.

Her frustrations are summed up in one quote she threw at me

“make sure I’m doing my job, but LET me do my job”
Or maybe her other favorite quote

“No Child Left Behind and No Teacher Left Standing”.

64

I agree with this. The problem is that the two goals of having tests be good and having tests be standardized are pretty much mutually exclusive. And also that these tests are usually mandatory, have extreme consequences for the insitution with regards to things like being accredited and financed, and are created by outside forces - state or national government rather than the teacher or school.

There are a bunch of different learning styles, and also a variety of types of knowledge. Standardized tests typically only focus on one vary narrow range of this - memorizing facts.

To a lesser extent the problem is less the standardization than it is the linear grading. You could probably come up with tests that were somewhat standardized but examined other types of learning/knowledge, but 1) the tests would be more complicated than multiple choice to administer, resembling more things like lab work, interviews and essays and 2) the grades would be more descriptive than numerical.

When teachers and schools are themselves judged on these mandatory test scores they have a huge incentive to focus on them at the expense of anything else that is important or prudent.

65

At the beginning of the school year we receive a letter from the district office notifying us that TheKid will be taking one of the standardized tests that upcoming spring. The test is important, means money for the school, but have a great year!

In November we’ll receive another letter. This one is a bit more direct. Your student will be taking this mandatory test in less than 6 months, and she really needs to do well on it otherwise your property taxes will go through the roof due to loss of funding for failing. Do what you can to help your student pass.

In January it starts to ramp up. OMG. Three months until THE Test. Another letter sent with a breakdown of how school will run during the week of testing. Class schedules are changed, electives are going to be briefly dropped, and again the note that if the school doesn’t receive high marks taxes will increase. This one will include info on all the MCA’s TheKid has taken since elementary school, with a breakdown of where she needs improvement.

By the end of February the stress level is ridiculous. We’ve moved from letters mailed home to e-mails and phone calls reminding us parents of the importance of these tests. TheKid has had weekly auditorium meetings about how to test well, how their schedule will change for that week, what to eat/drink that week, necessity of sleep, and BTW, you MUST do well if you ever want to make something of your life/ not lose all extracurriculars/ have your parents spend all their money on higher taxes.

The week of testing comes. I have received at least one e-mail and two calls per day about the importance of TheKid passing. TheKid has had her schedule all twisted for the past two weeks to prepare for the tests. Every day for the week prior she has brought home ‘study suggestions’ - info on how to study for the test (not actually on possible info, more in the line of “If you read the question and do not immediately know the answer, guess as best you can as an incorrect guess weighs more than no answer”), how to correctly mark answers, what to eat, what to wear. Her stress level is through the roof, as (IHerO) the future of the educational system rests solely on her back to make sure the little circle is filled in completely with the school proffered #2 pencil (the school issues pencils for the tests just in case someone is a renegade and tries to use a crayon, I guess).

She knows the information, but the stress placed on her wigs her out. I try to be calm about it all, but I become very annoyed at all the VERY IMPORTANT!!11!ONE!! messages from the school and I’m sure she absorbs some of it. Some of her friends are forced to private tutoring to learn specific to the tests - and many of these kids are already IB students and should be able to pass blindfolded even if the tests are in sanskrit.

When all is said and done, it’s difficult for them to get back into the normal routine. She will have missed two to three weeks of her elective courses, and trying to remember where they left off takes a few days. That’s if the teacher is kind. Her Spanish teacher decided to have a test on the first day back. Not so much.

I get the need for standardized testing. There needs to be some baseline of “Here is what we expect a 9th grade student to know”. I have issues with it being tied to school funding. Remembering back to when I was doing practicums in college, I also can agree to some measure of teacher pay being tied to performance (not for special ed, though). However, when you have students who are mainstreamed by force of parents and do nothing but disrupt, when you have students who couldn’t give a rats’ ass about the Crimean War but would rather text about gawd only knows, and when you have a school district that threatens more than celebrates, it’s a wonder why people want to teach.

66

You took the words right out of my mouth!

Dogzilla, ‘aptitude’ was the wrong word. What I meant was that I don’t think it is possible to make a good standardized test. ‘Good’ in this sense means that you can accurately measure a single student’s mastery of the material.

I think you can measure global, relative trends with standardized tests; you can tell that your school system is improving, or perhaps that your state is better than the one next door. But you can’t say ‘19% of our students can’t meet the standards in math’.

Take your example: What is 12 x 3?

First, there is the issue of notation. Some kids will use dots instead of an ‘x’. Sometimes the numbers are right next to each other. Sometimes there is an = sign, sometimes there is a solid line. Are the numbers vertical or horizontal? Then we’ve got foreign kids, who might be able to solve differential equations in a familiar context, but are unfamiliar with our number system and get ‘12’ confused with ‘21’.

All this may be differently taught by different schools, teachers, and parents. So you think you are testing a students ability to multiply two numbers, when really you are testing their familiarity with a particular notation or method. I feel this analysis could be extended to almost any question on your test. It is only in small groups that these educational idiosyncrasies are smoothed out and there is a consistent foundation from which to test.

67

Well, Dr. Cube, you are certainly entitled to your opinion and I appreciate your clarification. Your last points, I think, are grounded in ignorance. Ignorance of how the tests are built, what they are designed to assess, and all the psychometric mumbo-jumbo they go through to ensure that all the issues you bring up are exactly the problems that are avoided on the actual test.

Had you followed any of my links, particularly this one, you might have more insight. I know, I know, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him click on a link and read the damn thing. To oversimplify, and at the risk of being patronizing, it is possible to make a good standardized test and the link in this post explains, in excruciating detail, how one state does it.

I will wander on back to my hidey-hole now.

MissTake: I agree with you, as I state upthread: tying school funding and politicizing the results (YOUR TAXES WILL GO UP!!111!~) is not the purpose of these tests and those actions denigrate the validity of them. (And I don’t mean “validity” in the assessment sense of the word.)

68

The quality of education is a fairly complex subject. Then there is the quality of learning, a subject not so closely related than we might wish.

Teaching to the test is a politically mandated practice that pragmatics, and the self interest of teachers, school administrators, and local political practitioners guarantees will occur, without respect to its value to students, either now, or late in life. Many students will learn in such a system, some will not. Deciding whether it is more, or more equally distributed in effectiveness is not possible without a control group, and such groups are not available for study.

Teaching to the test is obviously better if you are planning on living a multiple choice life. Otherwise, maybe none of the above.

Tris

69

I wrote my last post in haste, so I didn’t get to say that I think you’ve been amazingly helpful and informative. I will also readily admit that I am ignorant of many possibly relevant details of the design and use of standardized tests. I hope to educate myself as time permits.

However, when I am ignorant of details, I try not to argue those details but instead the more basic philosophical questions that motivate the issue and that I can grasp and feel confident arguing.

I think for the most part we are in agreement. We both feel that politicizing scores and tying them to school funding and teacher salaries is wrong, which is my biggest beef with standardized testing. I still feel however that students and teachers are simply not homogeneous enough to measure accurately with a single test. Bias is a fact of life and while it can be minimized, it cannot be eliminated.

I also feel that standardized teaching is not a worthwhile goal, which is why I oppose ‘teaching to the test’. It eliminates valuable educational variety in a misguided attempt at statewide consistency. Standards are important, but they should about student’s knowledge and not teacher’s methods.

70

Thanks, Dr. Cube, that was a very polite and respectful way to agree to disagree. :wink: There isn’t as much bias on Florida’s test as you might think, but that is just one state. I can’t speak to the other 49 and I know what gymnastics (psychometrically) Florida goes through to minimize bias. It might not be possible to eliminate it completely – and in a consistent way state-by-state. Obviously this country is not very homogenous, so what is bias in Maine does not apply in Florida. I doubt North Dakota kids experience much anxiety if they see the word “hurricane” on a test, but it can stop a Florida kid cold in her tracks – especially if she’s experienced one recently. The words “Mariel Boat Lift” will never appear on Florida’s test for the same reason.

Secret Confessions of Standardized Test Editors: If I had children… I like to think I would put them in private schools, preferably Montessori or something alternative, or even home-school them myself. Private school students in this state are not required to take the test. Home-schooled kids can (they show up in the schools that day), but are not required to.

So yeah… we really don’t disagree all that much. I still think, however, that the test itself is the smallest of the demons we should be vilifying here.

71

MissTake, I would love to see your post above published in a newspaper or magazine. Please consider submitting it. :slight_smile:

72

As a college professor (math), I have no idea what subjects would be on these standardized tests, but I am naturally cautious. Here’s an example problem:

Solve x^2 - 6x + 8 = 0.

(a) x= 2 or x = 4
(b) x = -2 or x = -4
© x = 6 or x = 8
(d) some other answer.

Being able to get this question correct does not indicate that the student knows how to solve this problem. It only indicates that they know how to check their answer. Checking an answer and solving a problem are two completely different skill sets. Knowing how to do the latter is what one would like to test, but all you can test is the former.

Teaching to the test would only teach kids how to check their answers, leaving them incapable of actually solving the problem.

I have seen math tests where this sort of problem is addressed in serious math contests… for example, instead of asking for the answers, they might ask what the sum of the answers would be (or their product, or the difference between the two, etc)… but that’s something I’ve never seen on run-of-the-mill standardized tests .

73

It was discussed, at length, after the testing with both the principal and a district administrator. The principal blamed the district. The district blamed the state education offices (and BTW, I should be glad they shove the preparation down our throats, because you know what will happen if TheKid fails?!?)

This year she has the MCA-II/Reading Comprehension and Math. Reading will be a breeze. The math portion, OTOH, well… she failed Algebra. I posted somewhere here about her (now unemployed) Algebra teacher who was an embarassment to the profession. It will not be pretty. I already removed my phone number from the district roles, the school office has it in case of emergency. I just don’t want to deal with it.

Eight times a year I am given an ‘Official’ record - her grades. The schools have a basic structure that the teachers use to grade students. Every class, even back in elementary school, gave a syllabus and list of expectations and how grades would change based on student behavior and performance. That should be sufficient. I understand we have Timmy the QB who must pass English to play in the big game, so a political squeeze happens and Timmy magically receives a B when he’s done squat. We have Juan, the new student who doesn’t speak much English, but is in an all English-speaking classroom. Is it his fault he doesn’t understand what’s going on? Whose problem is it? The teacher who either doesn’t care and passes every lump in a chair, or the teacher who tries, but is stymied by parents/principals/board members?

As I said before, I get the idea behind standardized testing. There does need to be a set baseline. However, it should not be tied to funding. TheKid goes to a borderline school, between Minneapolis and the 'burbs. It’s a mixture of all incomes, races, languages, and backrounds. One test cannot account for everyone. One test cannot see how Juan can now understand English enough to converse with some ability, but his teachers can. One test can see that Timmy, despite receiving a B, cannot articulate a coherent thought, but does nothing to change the problem behind his passing the course in the first place.

74

Head asplode. :wink:

75

If it is so easy to create tests that can test things we consider important (such as critical thinking, practical application, research skills, ability to work in groups, presentation skills, etc.) why is it that no country with a test-based education actually tests these things? There are no shortage of test-based education systems to look at, and without fail they all focus on rote memorization.

76

Oops…double post…deleted…