Do you remember sitting at your computer screen, taking your fifty to fifty-two question NWEA? Standardized testing is any form of test that requires all test takers to answer the same questions. Some of the common standardized tests are the SAT’s and the SBAC tests. You take the SAT’s in high school and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium or the SBAC tests in middle school. Standardized testing negatively affects the school district’s financial state, the mental health of the student, curriculum of a class and lastly the time students have to learn.
The government’s spends about $10,658 for each individual student. (Atlas, 2016) Most of this money goes to standardized testing because some standardized tests cost around $59,000. I believe that the money spent by the government for students should go towards laptops or Chromebooks because instead of measuring the intellect that the students have, they should provide students with necessities such as Chromebooks and laptops. The money should be spent on equipment such as projectors, smart boards, and internet capabilities for teachers so they can teach their class with ease.
In my current school district, they provide us with gigantic amounts of standardized tests to measure how smart we are but they don’t give us enough laptops and fast internet connectivity to produce work and to learn. In this day and age students should be learning instead of getting a certain goal you need to reach or overcome on a standardized test. Teachers use standardized test to place students in classes and to raise or lower curriculum. But, standardized tests are an unreliable measure of students performance. Standardized testing negatively the upcoming classes for the upcoming year.
These tests don’t even show accurate results due to people having bad test days or are stressed out due to such serious tests which causes low scores. People could even get good scores due to luck. Showing that it all depends on the student’s state of well being and how lucky the student is on that day. “The study, which will be published next year, found that between 50 percent and 80 percent of the improvement in a school’s average test scores from one year to the next was temporary and was caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning or productivity. (Olson, 2012)
This quote proves that improvements in test scores are temporary and were caused by fluctuations. Some older students don’t even take the tests seriously because it doesn’t have an affect on their grades. But, what some students don’t know is that they could have big effect on what classes that the student will take in the upcoming years. The tests can even affect the colleges that they can get into because they go through your files, grades, and most of your standardized tests. Which can either get you to go into a very good college or a bad one.
Also teachers are heavily affected by the scores because if the students get good scores because of luck, they will get a harder curriculum and the students may not be capable of understanding and learning the harder curriculum. Which can make the teachers look bad because the students will be getting a harder curriculum, and they be failing. Now you will remember how these horrible tests affect schools income, school systems and even the wellness of students. Considering the negative effects of standardized testing, help decrease the amount of tests and time it takes to do these detrimental tests.
A way that the teachers can manage the curriculum is by evaluating the students work instead of giving them a fifty-two question test and telling them to do as best as you can. Also this can work when you are being placed into classes for upcoming years because teachers can recommend classes for you based on you as a student and your work, not a standardized test that you can get an amazingly good temporary score and end up failing your recommended class. Lastly standardized testing negatively affects the mental health of students by causing stress. As shown standardized testing can cause stomach aches to panic attacks.
As a parent and a former teacher, Couch said she’s watched high-stakes testing stress take its toll on students many times before. For even young children, that stress can manifest itself in physical and psychological ways, said Dr. Wendy Sapolsky of Carithers Pediatric Group. Over the past 20 years, the Jacksonville pediatrician says the number of children she’s seen with stressrelated illnesses around this time of year has grown. We’ve seen increased anxiety over the past five to eight years,” she said. “I mean, it’s just incredible. Sapolsky said the uptick at her office usually occurs between February and April.
During those months, she said she typically sees a new patient each day suffering some level of test-related anxiety, with symptoms ranging from stomach aches to panic attacks. ” (Thompson, 2014) As shown standardized testing can cause stomach aches to panic attacks. Standardized testing negatively impacts the teachers because 40% of the tests scores that students in grades K-12 will take will not become available until the following school year. Not only does it take a year to get the test scores back, the amount of time that it takes to take the tests is e between 20-25 hours a year for a middle school.
Showing that these tests take up a large amount of time. This time can be spent teachers teaching and students learning instead of taking tests. One thing that school districts can do is they can give standardized tests at the end of the school year instead of doing them in the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. This will save the school district money and will let students focus on learning during the school year instead of worrying about these unneeded tests during the school year. People will argue that standardized testing shows that standardized tests have a positive effect on students.
But, Failures in the education system have been blamed on rising poverty levels but now that we have the NCLB act that is now a false because that NCLB act provides extra money for the poor. What people don’t know is that when the NCLB No Child Left Behind Act; which is an act that provides money for extra educational assistance for poor children in return for improvements in their academic progress went into place the United States slipped from 18th in the world in math on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to 31st place in 2009, with a similar drop in science and no change in reading.
A national 2007 study by the Center on Education Policy reported that since 2001, 44% of school districts had reduced the time spent on science, social studies and the arts by an average of 145 minutes per week in order to focus on reading and math. “(Ravitch, 2015) This shows that there is time being taken away from other subjects such as science and social studies. This is very bad because focusing on the two subjects that are on standardized tests is taking away from important classes such as science and social studies or history.
