Standardized testing has been a growing controversial topic in America for several years. Should students be forced to take standardized test? Should teachers’ pay be based on those test results? How much preparation should be done for the test? Are students taking to many standardized tests? These are only some of the questions that have come up with standardized testing and I hope to answer throughout this paper. In the world of education standardized testing has become one of the most talked about topics and as a future teacher myself I decided to venture into the world of standardized testing and find out what the commotion is all about.
In this paper, I hope to not only reveal why standardized testing has become such a big issue but to also find out if standardized testing truly does reflect on a student’s learning and knowledge. In order to reveal what standardized testing is all about, we must first define standardized testing. In the textbook, Ed Psych, Jack Snowman, and Rick McCown define standardized testing as an assessment tool designed by people with specialized knowledge and administered to all students under the same conditions. Standardized test are made to show what a student has learned and their ability to use the knowledge that they have learned.
When seen this way standardized testing does not seem to be too big of a problem. However, it is the last part of the definition that changes everything, the test shall be administered to all students under the same conditions. This means that every student is required to take the same test or, at least, a test that asks similar questions and tests the same concepts. Every student must perform the test in the alluded time period and in roughly the same setting. In America, standardized testing under these conditions are given every day and if a student fails to well on these test they will not be able to succeed in the future.
In elementary school students must begin taking the some form of a standardized test. This test must be passed by high school or the student is unable to graduate. Then in order to continue into their education students must score well enough on the ACT and the SAT in order to get into a decent school. Although this is how standardized testing is used today, it has not always been used to this a testing began in china as a way to test applicants of government’s jobs knowledge of Confucian philosophy and poetry (time). In the western world, standardized testing did not become of importance until the early 1800s.
With the industrial revolution, many students left the family farms and started to attend school. With this great emergence of students and education, the western hemisphere used standardized examination as an easy way to test large numbers of students quickly. After that in 1905, Alfred Benet created an IQ test. These IQ tests became a readily used test by the military in World War II. The military used these test as standard practice to assign militant jobs to service men. It wasn’t until 1926 that standardized testing was used in the school setting. Until this point, standardized testing had been used to determine your job.
The standardized test placed people in the “proper” job based on a person’s IQ score. In 1926, the first SAT test was created. The SAT test or Scholastic Aptitude test was given to high schoolers before they entered college. This test original lasted 90 minutes and averaged 315 questions. These questions tested vocabulary and basic math. Over time, this test would develop to question other subjects as well such as reading and writing. The development of the SAT created a new market. Standardized testing has since developed into the creation of multiple tests for students in all grades starting in kindergarten.
This creates the first of many questions for students, parents, educators, and anyone else who knows anything about education. How early is too early to begin standardized testing on students. On a survey done by 15 adults, only one person suggest that standardized testing should begin in 1st grade and three participates suggested that testing begins in the third grade. The rest of the participants in the survey said that standardized testing should not begin until the middle or high school. Some students begin testing as early as preschool or kindergarten.
In the last couple years, there has been a major push to begin testing students earlier and earlier. Even though the government is pushing to begin testing students at younger ages others tend to disagree. In a study done my David A. David A. Frisbie and Kevin Andrews of the University of Iowa 600 kindergarteners and 25 teachers were studied to see how behaviors were observed to see if standardized testing caused any change. The study found that most teachers followed the directions of the test perfectly and that this did not cause any change from the requested behavior.
The kindergarteners, on the other hand, acted out tremendously in ways that were viewed inappropriately for a standardized test setting. Due to this Frisbie and Andrews viewed the test results as inadequate representations of the students’ knowledge. The results were deemed inadequate because a student may have shouted an answer out to the entire class, or a student may have copied off of another student’s test, more importantly, the norms of the test may not be suitable for all students (lowa study). As children grow and mature they learn the proper behaviors during a test.
As these students learn these the results are more likely to be deemed as proper reflections of a student’s learning. Older students are less likely to cheat on a test, shout out answers to the entire class, and they more likely to take the test a lot seriously than younger children. Due to these conditions scientist and educators are pushing to start testing students later in life. In the world of education, these test scores reflect on a teacher’s salary. This is also a reason why teachers are pushing for testing students later in their education or even at ll. Over the years, the government has begun to pay a teacher based on student performance. When a teacher’s students do well on standardized testing, the teacher is paid more.
If a group of students struggles on a state’s standardized test then that teacher suffers a pay cut. The United States Board of Education states on its website that “too often teachers compensations are too often based on factors that are unrelated to student achievement and that states and districts should re-examine their pay structure to better support and drive effective teaching. (USBE). Their website continues to speak on how by reinforcing teachers with money based on student performance then test scores will rise. This puts major pressure on teachers. Many people have begun to question how paying teachers more will force students to learn and perform better. Some tend to believe that the money will require teachers to teach more efficiently. However, testing has shown that no amount of teacher salary changes a student’s performance.
In a study done by the Vanderbilt University, found that teacher who was offered bonuses for student improvement on test produced no more improvement than those in the control group. Similar studies found the same results in New York City and Chicago. These states have created a trend for many other states and others have begun to realize that affecting teachers’ pay has no effect on the results of standardized testing. As a future teacher myself, the pressures of standardized testing turned me away from teaching.
After speaking with a couple teacher I did not want to endure the stress of having to worry about my student’s performance in order to get a decent size paycheck. Studies have found that I am not alone. Parents across America claims that student performance pay has led many wellqualified teachers to leave the profession. Teachers want to be in a supportive working environment. They want to view their coworkers as friends and people who they can bounce ideas off of rather than enemies who potentially could earn more money they do because they have better students. As teachers, we can nly control what a student does when they are learning. When it comes to taking standardized test teachers cannot control what a student will answer or how they choose their answer. The teacher also cannot control the home life of students. For example, if student a got in a fight with his parents the night before taking a standardized test, that student may come to the test frustrated and they may purposely answer the wrong questions in order to gain attention or make their parents mad. This situation is in no way a teachers fault and teachers should not be punished because of it.
The idea of student performance pay has also led to one other painful experience for children. The more stress that a teacher receives from standardized test the more they will prepare a student for those test. This does not necessarily mean that the student will be learning, though. In the survey given to 15 people, 12 of those people claimed that students partake into much test prep instead of learning. One participant stated that if teachers spent more time teaching and less time on test preparation that students will perform better on standardized testing.
Test preparation does not teach students anything because it is not meaningful. Doing multiple worksheets for weeks at a time does not teach students anything because the student does not process this information into their long term memory. In order for test preparation to become useful for students, teachers must make learning meaningful. Only then will a student begin to learn from test preparation (snowman). All in all standardized testing has proven to be for more a failure than a success.
Standardized testing has grown to become a very controversial matter in the educational world. The age-standardized testing should begin, whether or not teachers should be paid based on student performance, the amount of test preparation that should be done, and how much learning test prep brings for students are only a few concepts that disprove the successfulness of the great and powerful standardized testing. Hopefully, over the course of the next few years, the government will begin to listen to educators and a new way to measure student performance will be found.
