Hayden, M. Standardized quantitative learning assessments and high stakes testing: Throwing learning down the assessment drain. Philosophy of Education Yearbook, Hewson, K. The children in the numbers: Why aggregate achievement goals miss the mark. Kearns, L. Canadian Journal of Education, 34 2 , Klinger, D. The evolving culture of large-scale assessments in Canadian education.
Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 76 , Mora, R. Morris, A. OECD Publishing. Nelson, L. The impact of a junior high school community intervention project: Moving beyond the testing juggernaut and into a community of creative learners.
School Community Journal, 22 1 , Ozturgut, O. Academic Leadership , 9 3 , Riffert, F. The use and misuse of standardized testing: A Whiteheadian point of view. Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, 36 , In the United States, both public and private schools use standardized assessments each school year. In public schools, students must undergo many tests to ensure they are meeting state or federal standards. Private schools have more leeway, although at Whitby we do require our students from Grade 2 on to complete the Comprehensive Testing Program from the Educational Records Bureau and the International Schools Assessment from the Australian Council for Educational Research.
When Whitby students are assessed through standardized testing, we gain a valuable metric we can use to check the quality of our curriculum. With exams created and given by an independent organization, standardized test scores are useful because they come from a neutral source and give us data that we can compare to other independent schools across the United States and with other international schools across the globe. When we receive standardized test data at Whitby, we use it to evaluate the effectiveness of our education program.
We view standardized testing data as not only another set of data points to assess student performance , but also as a means to help us reflect on our curriculum. Assessment data is also useful for year-over-year internal comparisons. We compare data over a number of years to find trends—and then trace any changes back to their source.
Standardized tests are examinations administered and scored in a predetermined, standard manner. They typically rely heavily on question formats, such as multiple choice and true or false, that can be automatically scored. Not limited to academic settings, standardized tests are widely used to measure academic aptitude and achievement. Standardized testing requirements are designed to hold teachers, students, and schools accountable for academic achievement and to incentivize improvement.
They provide a benchmark for assessing problems and measuring progress, highlighting areas for improvement. Despite these key benefits, standardized academic achievement tests in US public schools have been controversial since their inception.
Major points of contention have centered on who should design and administer tests federal, state, or district level , how often they should be given, and whether they place some school districts at an advantage or disadvantage. More critically, parents and educators have questioned whether standardized tests are fair to teachers and students.
Teachers as well as students can be challenged by the effects of standardized testing. Common issues include the following:. In the s—when a number of states introduced performance-based assessments that included open-ended questions, written explanations of problem solving, and even experiments—researchers found clear evidence that these assessments influenced instruction.
During that era, when stakes attached to testing were lower, the average amount of time that U. In contrast, since the advent of No Child Left Behind NCLB , with its high stakes for schools, the traditional pattern of time allocation across subjects in elementary schools has changed markedly.
Five years into NCLB, researchers found that 62 percent of a nationally representative sample of all districts in the United States—and 75 percent of districts with at least one school identified as needing improvement—increased the amount of time spent on language arts and math in elementary schools. These increases were substantial: a 47 percent increase in language arts and a 37 percent increase in math.
Correspondingly, these districts decreased time allotted to other subjects and activities, including science, social studies, art, music, physical education, and recess McMurrer, Other studies from the NCLB era conclude that the higher the stakes are for educators, the more curriculum and instruction reflect what's on the test—particularly in low-performing schools where the threat of sanctions is strongest.
These researchers concluded that the content of the tests had effectively become the learning goals for students. Au's synthesis of 49 recent studies found a strong relationship between high-stakes testing and changes in curriculum and pedagogy.
More than 80 percent of the studies in the review found changes in curriculum content and increases in teacher-centered instruction. Similarly, a study of California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania school districts found that teachers narrowed their curriculum and instruction to focus on tested topics and also increased their use of test-like problem styles and formats Hamilton et al. High-stakes testing will likely remain the coin of the realm for the foreseeable future.
In fact, if test scores are used to evaluate individual teachers, the stakes will increase even more. The challenge, then, is to ensure that state tests do not continue to distort the curriculum in ways that deprive students of meaningful learning.
Two complementary approaches are promising. One is to improve testing by expanding both the number of subjects tested and items that tap understanding and reasoning; the challenge is to do so without increasing the total amount of testing. The other approach is to devise a more coherent curriculum.
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