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Standardized testing effects on education
The importance of standardized testing
The importance of standardized testing
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One reason that standardized tests aren’t good, is that the preparation of them is denying kids part of the fun in grade school. As stated in the book “The Case Against Standardized Testing”, the author Alfie Kohn stated, “You deprive kids of recess, eliminate music and the arts, cut back the class meetings and discussions of current events, offer less time to read books for pleasure, squeeze out the field trips and interdisciplinary projects and high-quality electives...” This is showing that testing is stripping kids of the pleasures grade school each year state testing occurs. You can see why standardized testing isn’t good
When has everything became about how well you do on a standardized test? (Interoggative sentence/rhetorical sentence) Okay students, today you’ll be taking the PARCC. Okay students, today you’ll be taking the AIRS. Okay students, today you’ll be taking the Explorer SAT.
In 1926, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, SAT, was created and students have had to take the SAT and others like it since. When the first standardized tests, the ACT and SAT, came about they were meant to see how “smart” the students were. In the case of the ACT, students were judged on how well they remembered what they were taught. The tests are basically doing little to benefit students as they are just used to learn the scholastic knowledge. Another reason they should be done away with is because, these type of tests are not created so that all students will have a fair advantage.
Have you ever thought about the admission process that colleges go through to get the best group of students into their school? It is often based largely on standardized tests high school students have to take if they plan to continue their education past the 12th grade. Most of these tests, such as the ACT and SAT, include questions about the basic understanding on many core subjects within a specific time limit. After you get done with the test, you get to wait a short time period to see your results of how well your grasp is about individual subjects and if you are “college-ready”. The moment you receive your results, you see a big, red number between one through thirty-six as a composite score of all the areas combined.
In 2015 the SAT scores where the lowest grades in ten years. Honestly without the big SAT and PARCC testing, the world would be much easier. It would be less nerve racking. For instance, it would be more humane for the children. If the test scores are low, gives children stress, and the testing is inhumane, especially why are the poor little children, and teachers taking the test?
For the Love of Standardized Tests Take a minute to think about the various standardized tests you have taken throughout your life. All over the world, throughout elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and graduate schools, standardized tests are used to determine one’s level of intelligence. I know what you are thinking, these tests are old fashioned, repetitive, and a poor indication of a person’s knowledge, but you are incorrect. Standardized tests are the perfect way to evaluate self-worth because they include all aspects of an individual. I mean what else really matters in life besides math, science, reading, and english?LC#1
In the article “Teacher Voice: In Defense of Standardized Testing” by James Aycock, he states, “if I teach something, but my class still hasn’t mastered it, then as a teacher I need to examine how I taught it the first time in order to teach it better next time”. Likewise, if my class already knows something, I don’t need to teach it to them; we can move on to other things”. This really explains how critical testing is for not only students but also for teachers. It gives goals for both to work on. Another topic to show interest in when discussing the necessity of a standardized test is the fact of all curriculum tests are not equal.
Throughout the years, standardized testing has become something no student looks forward to. But, there might be deeper reasons as to why they despise it. Standardized tests have been around since the mid-1800s and have been used to measure a students' knowledge and ability to achieve their goals. However, as the year's progress, this form of testing has proven to cause problems. Students, teachers, and schools are all affected by standardized testing and its components in various ways.
The United States has been talked about as being a powerful nation, but our education system has become ineffective. The United States lacks the high test scores compared to the likes of nations such as Finland and Singapore. As a nation we must ask, what seems to be the problem? A critical issue that is holding our country back is the enforcement of standardized testing in the United States.
Valerie Strauss, an education writer for the Washington Post for nearly 30 years, states, “The average student in America's big-city public schools takes some 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and the end of 12th grade — an average of about eight a year, the study says.” Standardized testing has been used in the United States for over 50 years. There are two types of standardized tests, aptitude tests and achievement tests. An aptitude test measures what a student’s knowledge is in a particular subject area. The achievement tests measure the amount of knowledge one has.
Throughout the many years of education, schools have always done their best to educate kids to the best of their ability. Creating advanced and top-notch students, teachers and curriculums tend to concentrate on preparing students for the yearly standardized tests. Teaching to the test allows teachers to establish a common curriculum that students need to and are able to learn. In order to ensure students’ success on these tests, schools only teach what will be on the test, excluding other important areas of important knowledge. Although public schools focus on preparing students for state standardized tests, removing these lengthy tests could improve and develop students’ futures and help focus on more important life skills.
Foremost, many believe that schools should cut federal funding for standardized testing, sine a huge amount of money goes into standardized testing. One states, “If the money for standardized assessments was instead put toward teacher raises, the report estimates that each teacher in the country would receive, on average, a raise of $550, or 1 percent”(Ujifusa) This will help teachers out by getting more money for their family, but it can also help teachers raise their level of education, making teachers even more qualified then they already are. This will also help students, by having higher qualified teachers, and the extra money will go to clubs and activities, that students participate in. If schools cut the funding that would free up about, “... $1.7 billion a year overall, or a quarter of 1 percent of total K-12 spending in the United States”(Ujifusa).
Germany government has adopted several strategies to make their labor market flexible aiming to increase employment rates. However, many experts argue that unemployment can negatively affect social cohesion and even individual well-being. The research question within this article is how employment insecurity affects social alienation. Researchers built three hypotheses. First, “Social well-being is associated with the extent of labor market integration: unemployed than employed, temporary than permanent, and temporary agency employment than fixed-term employment workers are more likely to suffer social exclusion.”
For the past eight decades, schools have been testing their students at the end of the school year to see what they have learned. These tests have been called by different names, but they all have one thing in common--they are used to rate the school and the teachers therein. Annual standardized testing should be stopped because it does not test students’ high level thinking, it is a waste of good education time, and it causes undue stress on the students who have to take the test. Today, forms of standardized testing are only limited to educational subjects whilst ignoring vital subjects. For example, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) does not include what many people prefer over monotone logic and mathematical statistics; creativity.
School is for students to go for about seven hours a day to learn the skills of education that they can apply during the rest of their lives. It is designed to get more complex as one grows older. School is designed where there is a topic taught, and once it is learned, a student will take a test covering that topic. In the end of the course, a standardized test will be given. “The average student in America’s big-city public schools takes some 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and the end of twelfth grade,” (Strauss).
