School Beat: Why I Hate Standardized Testing

by Lisa Schiff‚ Beyond Chron (reposted)

Thu, May 3, 2007 7:51AM

April is standardized testing month in the San Francisco Unified School District. For the second week in a row, kids of all ages are sitting down to sheets of multiple-choice questions, armed with newly sharpened pencils for battling sets of fill-in-the-bubble options. This is hardly the image we all have of students guided by creative teachers as they tackle challenging, engaging studies.

The promise of standardized testing is that the results will tell us--for individual students, groups of students disaggregated by socio-economic factors, schools and districts--how well our kids have mastered the curriculum standards established for their respective grade levels. Lawmakers have been so lured by that promise that for the most part, standardized tests are now the only measure of achievement levels that are officially recognized.

But that approach leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, such tests are only one way to evaluate student success. It’s been long-recognized that multiple points of evaluation are required to assess social phenomena with assurance, and educational outcomes are no exception.

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http://beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4471#more

§More on Standardized Testing—Timing is Everything

by Susan Gold (reposted)

Thu, May 10, 2007 7:59AM

In response to Lisa Schiff's recent article titled 'Why I Hate Standardized Testing' I would like to add one more important element to the argument that standardized tests are not adequate measures of student achievement: timing.

What if you were taking a class and the final exam was scheduled before the end of the semester? What if it were scheduled after you had attended only 80% of the course? What if the professor told you the reason for this was to enable you to get your results two months later in the middle of your semester break? What if the professors and the college were evaluated on yours and other students’ scores on the final exam? What if an administrator could be fired if the scores were low?
Bizarre? Yet that’s the way we do things in California’s public schools. The battery of standardized tests are given within a window of 21 days, no more than 10 days before and ten days after 85% of the school year has passed. In San Francisco we normally begin testing as soon as the window opens.

Testing itself takes up two weeks of instructional time, but that is minimal compared to the amount of time that goes into test preparation. Since the test has a special format, students need to be taught how to demonstrate their knowledge within that particular framework. Therefore, a minimum of two weeks prior to the test, most teachers must focus on how to master the tricks of the trade: how to differentiate a good answer from the “best” answer, how to filter information, and how to pace oneself. Schools, especially those whose test scores in past years have been “below basic,” let subject matter go by the wayside as early as March. Many schools devote at least a month to test preparation.

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http://beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4495#more

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