And how are these schools or districts or groups of students identified? Through standardized tests. Sure, no test is perfect.
But when looking at a huge system, you can only see general trends. Can we really trust these tests to give an accurate measurement of student learning? But these tests can look at different groups of students within a school and help school leaders learn which students are struggling or whether instructional changes need to be made. Is that because there are more students this year with learning disabilities? Were there too many snow days? Did the district just implement a new reading program that perhaps is slowing achievement down?
Are teachers not receiving as much guidance as they had in previous years? Results culled from standardized tests can narrow down the reasons and, thus, point educators towards the right solutions. As Katrina Miller of Educational Partnerships explains,. We must overcome the fear of data in education. Having as much robust data as possible only helps us better understand student needs. Doctors order full bloodwork for a check-up so they have a picture of how the whole human system is working.
We need this same mindset in education. Why stress him out with a test? Our teachers definitely have great intuition about student progress.
Changing those systems requires the hard statistical evidence provided by standardized tests. It takes hard work to improve systems. Many people agree that forcing kids to take tests during a plague-ridden year would be pointless and even cruel.
Indeed, early in the pandemic, the Trump administration allowed states to waive all spring standardized tests for The following year, many expected the Biden Administration to do the same thing, since large numbers of students were still learning remotely and schools had struggled all year to keep pace with learning. However, the Biden administration heeded the concerns of civil rights and educational justice groups, requiring that states continue testing , precisely because it was such a challenging year and so many children would have fallen behind.
However, states received tremendous flexibility in how and who they tested in , so in truth, we are losing two years of data. This no doubt produces huge obstacles for districts that seek to diagnose the effectiveness of their schools and curricula, and removes a critical tool from the advocacy toolbelt of the civil rights sector.
Become an informed consumer. Information is power. In order to advocate effectively, you must understand the purpose of particular tests and how your school will use the results. Is it to drive instruction?
Is it to measure state trends? Is it to fulfill federal regulations? One of the strings attached is your state has to come up with a plan to assess student progress during this pandemic year. No hiding from learning loss! We need the data in order to create plans that will address the crisis. Our schools are failing to justly serve large groups of children; in this sense, supporting standardized testing is part of the work of ensuring child justice.
Current standardized tests, while vital for improving learning gaps, are stuck in the Stone Age. In order to minimize the time and money spent on assessments, state education systems need to invest in innovating our testing infrastructure.
Activists can demand their state leaders invest in innovation to make tests less stressful and more useful for students, teachers, parents, schools and states. Yet, these tests have changed. Nevertheless, knowing some of the pros and cons of standardized testing can help you better understand the American education system as a whole and how to approach it.
Below, you can find some of the major arguments in favor of standardized testing. Schools, colleges, and states that require standardized testing generally believe these to be true, even if they are also aware of some of the downsides to standardized tests see below.
The obvious purpose of standardized testing is to create a standard. Proponents of standardized testing argue that some kind of examination outside of school curricula—which can vary widely by school district—can help an education system better compare students from very different backgrounds because all these students took the exact same test. By measuring students against that universal standard, it becomes easier to evaluate and rank them. In the same way that standardized tests provide a standard to measure students, they can also help set larger educational standards for schools across a state or country.
If students in particular school districts are struggling to perform at grade level, superintendents and governments know to get involved. In addition to comparing students against one another or identifying problematic schools or districts, standardized tests can also illustrate student progress over time. Taking the same or similar tests over the years can allow students to indicate measurable improvement. Standardized tests can give students from under-performing high schools a chance to prove that they have mastered ample academic material despite their circumstances.
Because standardized tests are not tied to any one high school curriculum, they can offer an inclusive opportunity for students to highlight their successful performance. Proponents argue that standardized testing can help level the playing field in public education. Finally, while much of the arguing around standardized testing is focused on high school students and younger, the fact is that standardized testing is often a fact of life well beyond secondary school.
While reviewing concepts can help students become more familiar with a topic, information is quickly forgotten without more active learning strategies like frequent practice quizzes. But to reduce anxiety and stereotype threat—the fear of conforming to a negative stereotype about a group that one belongs to—retrieval-type practice tests also need to be low-stakes with minor to no grades and administered up to three times before a final summative effort to be most effective.
Timing also matters. Students are able to do fine on high-stakes assessment tests if they take them shortly after they study. A study found that students who had brief retrieval tests before a high-stakes test remembered 60 percent of material, while those who only studied remembered 40 percent. Additionally, in a study , eighth graders who took a practice test halfway through the year remembered 10 percent more facts on a U. Short, low-stakes tests also help teachers gauge how well students understand the material and what they need to reteach.
Summative tests, such as a final exam that measures how much was learned but offers no opportunities for a student to improve, have been found to be less effective. Teachers should tread carefully with test design, however, as not all tests help students retain information. Though multiple choice tests are relatively easy to create, they can contain misleading answer choices—that are either ambiguous or vague—or offer the infamous all-, some-, or none-of-the-above choices, which tend to encourage guessing.
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