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"Many achievement tests come with instructions on what to do if a child vomits on the answer sheet" (Bracey 104).
What's wrong with this picture?
"Within the American psyche is a basic, albeit flawed, equation that states: “test scores = ability" (Dana Henley - "Standardized Tests: An American Obsession").
What's wrong with this picture?
"My son (grade 3) had a standardized test today. Yep, The Full Battery (whatever that means!). I think it is funny that the state would want to test your kids on the "full battery" (including Science and History) when you aren't even using the same curriculum, scope or sequence. It doesn't make sense, but we are law abiding citizens, so we complied." (Anonymous, "Standardized Test Humor").
What's wrong with this picture?
"My children generally do well on standardized tests...(However, one year, one of my little darlings decided that it was not necessary to utilize scratch paper to complete the math portion of the test, and his score suffered for it. The best laid plans and all that...)" (Life on the Planet: Standardized Tests).
What's wrong with this picture?
"[NCLB] hurts the nation's students more than it helps them; promotes low rather than higher standards; misleads the public about school performance; pushes teachers out of schools where they are most needed; and drrives down the level of instruction in many classrooms" (Bracey 107, quoting Washington Monthly journalist Thomas Toch in November 2001 - two months before NCLB was signed into law).
What's wrong with this picture?
Standardized tests are thought, at least under the precepts of NCLB, to assess what we know about the ways in which students learn, how much they have absorbed from the curriculum, and measure their progress on a yearly basis. But this is not possible. I didn't learn one thing about how my students write, adapt the writing process, or apply methods of drafting and revision from giving them a multiple-choice test last year. Oh, I still tested them, mind you - I had to, since I needed at least 6 major test grades per quarter. The best I could do was use short-answer questions in order to parallel the kind of writing we did in class, make the questions open-ended, and allow the students to use their notes, drafts, etc. Some still treated this test like an isolated, behavioristic test with pre-determined right answers.
Behaviorism assumes that we can take knowledge, break it down into bite-size chunks, and then let students suck it up through glorified straws - teachers - as knowledge funnels through them rather than spread out among the students. Not likely. Students learn when they are allowed to (1) connect new information to past experiences and (2) make deeper meaning out of the ideas covered. Standardized tests take concepts, reduce them to bite-size factoids with only one possible right answer, ignorant of the conditions under which students learned the content, and narrow-minded in the belief that a test claiming to be objective and non-biased in its structure produces accurate results.
But as Bracey reminds us (119-120), a test is only "standardized" in the sense that it has all students answer the same questions, gives them the same amount of time to answer the questions, groups them under the same format, and forces students to follow the same instructions. That has nothing to do with objectivity, which is only in scoring as done by machine, or bias - underlying bias will always exist in test content as long as subjective human beings decide what items to include on the test and what constitutes a correct answer.
No, when I think of standardized tests, I think quick results. Documentable data. Yearly progress goals. Same, same, same (or might I say shame, shame, shame?).
How is that an indicator of actual achievement? Bracey suggests the public gradually lost faith in the teacher's ability to ascertain what students learned in the school and replaced it with a hyper-dependency upon numbers to tell the story. Yet numbers are in the hands of people; they can only tell the stories people want them to tell. If it serves an agenda, they will focus on the glowing percentages of students that achieved high test scores ignoring the implicit percentages that did not. NCLB asks, no, demands that all children must be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014, yet it leaves states to determine what qualifies as "proficient" and uses nothing but tests to evaluate schools. Otherwise, as George W. Bush would argue, how can we know if children are learning?
What's wrong with this picture?
What's wrong with this picture?
"Within the American psyche is a basic, albeit flawed, equation that states: “test scores = ability" (Dana Henley - "Standardized Tests: An American Obsession").
What's wrong with this picture?
"My son (grade 3) had a standardized test today. Yep, The Full Battery (whatever that means!). I think it is funny that the state would want to test your kids on the "full battery" (including Science and History) when you aren't even using the same curriculum, scope or sequence. It doesn't make sense, but we are law abiding citizens, so we complied." (Anonymous, "Standardized Test Humor").
What's wrong with this picture?
"My children generally do well on standardized tests...(However, one year, one of my little darlings decided that it was not necessary to utilize scratch paper to complete the math portion of the test, and his score suffered for it. The best laid plans and all that...)" (Life on the Planet: Standardized Tests).
What's wrong with this picture?
"[NCLB] hurts the nation's students more than it helps them; promotes low rather than higher standards; misleads the public about school performance; pushes teachers out of schools where they are most needed; and drrives down the level of instruction in many classrooms" (Bracey 107, quoting Washington Monthly journalist Thomas Toch in November 2001 - two months before NCLB was signed into law).
What's wrong with this picture?
Standardized tests are thought, at least under the precepts of NCLB, to assess what we know about the ways in which students learn, how much they have absorbed from the curriculum, and measure their progress on a yearly basis. But this is not possible. I didn't learn one thing about how my students write, adapt the writing process, or apply methods of drafting and revision from giving them a multiple-choice test last year. Oh, I still tested them, mind you - I had to, since I needed at least 6 major test grades per quarter. The best I could do was use short-answer questions in order to parallel the kind of writing we did in class, make the questions open-ended, and allow the students to use their notes, drafts, etc. Some still treated this test like an isolated, behavioristic test with pre-determined right answers.
Behaviorism assumes that we can take knowledge, break it down into bite-size chunks, and then let students suck it up through glorified straws - teachers - as knowledge funnels through them rather than spread out among the students. Not likely. Students learn when they are allowed to (1) connect new information to past experiences and (2) make deeper meaning out of the ideas covered. Standardized tests take concepts, reduce them to bite-size factoids with only one possible right answer, ignorant of the conditions under which students learned the content, and narrow-minded in the belief that a test claiming to be objective and non-biased in its structure produces accurate results.
But as Bracey reminds us (119-120), a test is only "standardized" in the sense that it has all students answer the same questions, gives them the same amount of time to answer the questions, groups them under the same format, and forces students to follow the same instructions. That has nothing to do with objectivity, which is only in scoring as done by machine, or bias - underlying bias will always exist in test content as long as subjective human beings decide what items to include on the test and what constitutes a correct answer.
No, when I think of standardized tests, I think quick results. Documentable data. Yearly progress goals. Same, same, same (or might I say shame, shame, shame?).
How is that an indicator of actual achievement? Bracey suggests the public gradually lost faith in the teacher's ability to ascertain what students learned in the school and replaced it with a hyper-dependency upon numbers to tell the story. Yet numbers are in the hands of people; they can only tell the stories people want them to tell. If it serves an agenda, they will focus on the glowing percentages of students that achieved high test scores ignoring the implicit percentages that did not. NCLB asks, no, demands that all children must be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014, yet it leaves states to determine what qualifies as "proficient" and uses nothing but tests to evaluate schools. Otherwise, as George W. Bush would argue, how can we know if children are learning?
What's wrong with this picture?
posted by david @ 9:50 AM
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