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Standardized Tests Effectively Measure Student Achievement
The effectiveness of standardized testing
Does standardized testing have negative effects on education
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No one ever said school was easy. It takes quite a bit of hard work and preparation from both the students and teachers. All within a school year there are different homework, assignments, projects, tests, quizzes, presentations and much more to try and fit into an already busy course schedule. To add to that the Education Reform Law of 1993 was introduced to schools, which required that all public school students have to be tested in the subjects of English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science and Technology Engineering. Those set of tests are called Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and they are meant to measure students performance based on the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework.
Standardized testing not only stresses out students, but it also leads the teachers to go in a dilemma whether to focus on the curriculum or to get students ready for the standardized testing. No one has ever enjoyed taking a test in his or her entire educational history. Similarly Mr. Estrada’s 4th grade class was not every excited about taking standardized test. Each student has his or her own level of learning. As the students were taking the test, I noticed some students were panicking, while others were confused.
Since 2006, overall SAT scores have dropped by 21 points. It is safe to say that the increase in standardized testing has done more bad than good. When standardized testing became more prominent, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) saw a plateau in reading and math scores. Additionally, the NAEP saw no further closure in the test score gap. The test score gap affects all minorities.
Should the United States lower the legal drinking age, which is now twenty-one, to a more reasonable age, such as eighteen. The legal drinking age is unjust and unfair. Therefore, it should be lowered to eighteen to make all adults equal. Individuals often compare drinking with unsuccessfulness and/or recklessness, and that is not the case at all. Overtime there have been millions of successful and intelligent people that commonly consumed alcohol.
In 2001 George W. Bush in started the no child left behind program. This program stated that children from grades three through twelve should be given a standardized test at the end of their course. The original purpose of these tests was to hold educators accountable for their teaching method. While the no child left behind program (NCLB) might have made teachers actually teach, there has been some bad effects to this program. Some of the bad effects of the program are the stress put on children, the inaccuracy of the standardized test and finally the tremendous cost of these tests.
True high-stakes standardized testing was begun in 2001, as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was put into place to help make it so that all children would have an equal opportunity to learn, regardless of their race, ethnic background or their families’ income level. While their goals sound admirable, the problem began with the implementation of the act; they wanted to ensure that each child was at least proficient in the standards that they developed, so they decided that testing was the best way to do so (Aske, Connelly & Corman, 2013). The issue with this is that not all students excel at test-taking, and putting so much emphasis on it can cause a student severe stress and anxiety (Colwell, 2013). In 2009, Race to the Top was implemented, but instead of placing less emphasis on testing and more on learning, it made the stakes worse, ensuring that schools that had students who did not perform as well could be shut down, or individual teachers could be fired if they did not show what was considered to be appropriate progress in test scores, which might soon prove impossible since the optimal goal is to reach a level of 100 percent of the students in a school to the proficiency level (Tavakolian & Howell,
There are so many results for a single test that does not even evaluate a student’s knowledge accurately. A single bad day could be disastrous to a student’s career, and a day of lucky guessing can float them by another year. Teachers are “graded” on their class’s results, so if a teacher’s class does poorly, that teacher may have an intervention coming.[PP1] Some people have even advocated for teachers’ pay and job security to be based upon the results of testing(“High-Stakes Test Definition”). Schools are given “grades” as well, and funding is based on them.
Standardized assessments to many others can be considered an important role in the educational system and they believe that they have brilliantly positive effects on improving a student’s learning based the results of these tests. “My appreciation of having had the privilege of introducing standardized tests in my school cannot be too strongly emphasized… No school can accurately determine the progress of its pupils, either as a group or individually, without using these tests” (E.M.W. 126). It is true that these tests can review results of standardized tests, but does it hold accurate results of how effectively these children are learning educational material? It’s important to understand that these results can only tell one side of the story.
The issue with intelligence testing also relates to the issue with schools producing conformity. One of the many ways that conformity is taught is through standardized testing (Wheeler, 2013). These tests only evaluate ours skills based on one type of intelligence. Therefore, “standardised testing, in all its forms, is designed to capture a narrow, quantifiable impression of children's abilities”(Wheeler, 2013, p.5). Intelligence tests fail to evaluate a majority of the vital components of intelligence (“Intelligent intelligence”,n.d.).
High-stakes testing is something most people have experienced; however, the stigma around the testing has changed drastically within the last twenty years. Becoming more popular with the push to become smarter as a nation, high-stakes testing has become a kind of epidemic across the land. High stakes testing is detrimental to the future of United States education due to how it has become all-encompassing in schools, how accountable it makes a single test, and how the actual effects stray from the desired ones. Achieving the “standards” that are imposed upon the results of high-stakes tests is the single most important goal a school tends to make.
These tests promised a way to identify kids who could go further in their education, while separating them from the kids who learned slower and would need extra help. The tests also came with the notion of academic tracking in order to steer students onto a career path deemed appropriate for them (Gershon, 2015). Attempting to measure a student’s intelligence through a standardized test is beyond absurd. All students learn at a different pace. This means that, even if a student may not know a skill at the time of the test, it doesn’t mean that they will never know it.
Sometimes tests only show a small portion of what is being teached and don’t truly test kids on their understanding but what they can pick from a little multiple choice bubble. “Tests were used in ancient China, Greece, and Rome to determine fitness for public and government service. Many early testing systems attempted to evaluate reading and writing abilities as well as qualitative characteristics such as creativity. Attempts to codify testing procedures eventually made it
A Hendersonville school principal, Judy Burt, had made this statement on the effects on standardized testing. Burt's statement has truth, however does not support standardized testing. From the information I have already given you, we know that effective learning, engagement and excitement are not results from standard testing. The academic issues caused by testing can be resolved by utilizing tests the way they should. Facts have proved that the emphasis on testing is ineffective.
Standardized testing does not fairly consider the differences between students, they can cause anxiety for the students, and standardized tests lead to teachers changing lessons and teaching to the test because standardized tests are not the most beneficial option for students education and emotional health. Overall, Standardized testing has not improved students education and has caused many negative effects including greater stress levels among students, teachers cutting out important lessons and limiting students creativity, and the test are unfair because they are not made specifically for different: ethnicities, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Standardized tests have not caused an increase in the United States ranking in the world in fact the United States has gone down from 18th in the world in math to 31st since they have mandated them nationwide, So are these inaccurate unfair tests really worth the stress and educational suffering of America 's
What is intelligence? Can true intelligence even be measured? The theory is that certain tests can measure such intelligence and intellectual achievement. Testing in education and physically, is an attempt to measure a person’s knowledge, or other characteristics in a systematic way. Also, teachers give test to find the certain abilities students possess and tell whether they have learned the subject (“Testing”181).
