Ap English Teacher Ankur Singh

As a result of testing accountability, teachers have changed the shift in their classrooms and focus on teaching to the test. Many criticize that the tests that are administered do not allow for thoughtful or deliberate thinking. Multiple choice questions, condensed reading passages, add to the inauthenticity of the test and can impede the ability of students. Studies have also show that test taking has a negative impact on student achievement in reading, writing, and mathematics. ELL students are still developing their English language skills while learning new content. It is unfair to have the expectations that these ELL students are being held accountable with the same standards as their native-English-speaking peers. ELL students need to have the necessary background knowledge, English language and academic language knowledge to successfully understand test

Although standardized testing has been a major part of schooling it has also had a negative impact on effective education. Standardized has made a huge impact on public schooling so much that not only does it affect the students but also the teachers. With the teachers now beginning to get raises or having their jobs on the line if their students fail the test, many students have not been getting the fullest education process that they could get. Students may not realize the impact that it has had on the type of teaching style that they receive because they are so used to it. With so many teachers not having a lot of time to teach what is on the test and the other things that they feel are important to students to know, a lot of

Getting an education is the main goal for everyone, although it is easy to obtain there are some obstacles to it. One of the main obstacles students face at the beginning of their education is standardized tests. Schools have started to adopt this type of tests as their main way to evaluate students’ intelligence and teachers’ effectiveness to educate the students. The way students used to learn has changed, in order to get them ready for the tests they have to spend much of the school time preparing for it instead of learning something they can use in their future life. According to Bruce Jacobs in No Child Left Behind's Emphasis on 'Teaching to the Test' Undermines Quality Teaching, a 2007 study by the University of Maryland teachers were put in much pressure and had thoughts to teach the test […]. This shows that teachers have also been affected by standardized tests in a way they have more pressure to make students pass. Having teachers ‘teach the test’ means their way to educate has been corrupted. In most cases when teachers’ ability to educate has been changed leads them to practice methods not convenient for scholars. One of these methods is memorization, in Relying on High-Stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea by Hani Morgan describes how students start to adapt to an “inferior type of learning, based on memorization and recall students gain when teachers

Some of these variables might negatively affect a student's ability to answer the specific multiple-choice questions on a standardized test, but the learning potential lies within the student, not the multiple-choice question. The makers of the test cannot encompass all the variables of the students in the multiple-choice questions, nor should they have to try. The multiple-choice questions should be replaced with essay questions that allow for a diverse response from students of many backgrounds, not one "standard" response from a uniform background. Supporters of standardized testing might argue that a test cannot encompass all the variables of the student population, but essay questions encourage diversity, not uniformity, in the students.

Standardized tests take away the creativity from the teachers forcing them to "teach to the test" this means memorizing

Teachers strive for their students to score well because the score also reflects on their teaching. Teachers seem to no longer teach for students to learn material and retain knowledge but to “ace” tests. Some learn to teach according to the test. Students learn the information that is going to be on the test but do not necessarily fully understand the material they are learning. There are certain standards that have to be met with each test. In most states part of the scores reflect the

According to education researcher Gregory J. Cizek, these tests are not helping the child. They’re hurting them. He knows that teacher need to show off what their students know, but he just doesn't understand why we have to do these tests. He can tell by his work that more than half of kids have an anxiety toward testing. The student may know a lot, but will freeze during the test. “Standardized testing can create a lot of stress for both educators and students. Excellent teachers quit the profession every day because of how much stress is on them. Students especially feel the pressure when there is something meaningful tied to them. In Oklahoma, high school students must pass four standardized tests in various areas, or they do not earn a diploma, even if their GPA was a 4.00. The stress this can cause on a teenager is not healthy in any way,” he states. His plan is to show people that this is a wrong thing to do and is unhealthy for both educators and the

The use of standardized testing to measure students’ knowledge is an inaccurate reflection of their capabilities. By being forced to take a test that does not effectively show their abilities, students become overstressed, and the tests themselves do not promote true academic achievement. Rather than learning about subjects in order to gain knowledge, students simply memorize facts and formulas to get a decent test score. Standardized tests are not an appropriate measure of student performance, only benefit certain groups of students, and do not prepare students for the real world.

This idea of teaching to the test is a complete waste of educational time, that is spent preparing students for this extremely important test, that could be time going into learning things that will prepare students for college and life after college. The reason teachers do this is because they are under such pressure from the school districts to have good scores on these tests, due to the increase in funding to schools that do well and the lack in funding to schools that do poorly, that they can only find the time to prepare for these standardized tests instead of “teaching students skills that go beyond the tests”

Students spend a lot of time stressing over standardized testing when they could be focusing their energy on more important academic and social activities that could benefit them in the future. Standardized testing are stressful for students for one that it is timed, students often times can not focus knowing that they have a certain amount of times to take this very important test. And if they start stressing out from not having enough time left then they are gonna start writing or bubbling in random answers and then that can cause them to do worst. Teachers are being told to “teach the test”,the teachers don't want to teach us the same basic things every year, but if they don't then students will be unsuccessful when it comes time to taking the exams. Which can lead to consequences ad problems for both the student and the teacher. Some of those consequences may include students being held back, teachers getting in trouble or possibly loosing their jobs because they have failed to meet the standards set and what people think students should learn and what type of material the teachers should teach.” Brain research suggests that too much stress is psychologically and physically harmful. And when stress becomes overwhelming, the brain shifts into a “fight or flight” response, where it is impossible to engage in the higher-order thinking processes that are necessary to respond correctly to the standardized test

Meanwhile, when students are excited about exploring a topic in depth, they are shut down because there is no time to learn, only time to memorize items that may be on the tests. Teachers on average spend more time on the memorization of specific words or questions that will be on the test, not the building exercises. Standardized tests are a waste of classroom time and does nothing besides hindering the learning process of students. Since teachers have to teach according to the test, they lose valuable teaching time and it narrows the

"At best, any test can measure students' knowledge of only a subset of the content in a particular subject area; it is also generally more difficult to design test items at higher levels of cognitive complexity." (Do High-Stakes Tests Improve Learning?). This article makes the valid point that high stakes testing only tests lower level thinking skills and ignores student's complex and higher level thinking. "The current tests don't measure

Ever since then standardized testing has been a huge part of education. Teachers across the nation had to teach to the curriculum instead of what they thought the students needed to learn. Nowadays colleges strictly look at ACT and SAT scores rather than classroom grades, because they believe that some teachers grade on a curve and are not giving the students a fair chance. Standardized tests are an unreliable measure of student performance. A 2001 study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year tests core improvements were temporary and “caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning…”(“Standardized Tests”). Teachers are stressed over if they are teaching “correctly”. They went to a 4-year college, some even more, to get a degree in something that they wanted to do, either for themselves or for the children, and now they have to “teach to the test”. Tests can only measure a portion of the goals of education. A pschometrician, Daniel Koretz says, “standardized tests usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.”(Harris, Harris, and Smith).

Standardized testing creates a lot of stress on students and educators alike. Because of how much stress is put on them to prepare students for these tests, many excellent teachers quit their jobs everyday. In fact, in April, new federal data stated that 17 percent of new public school teachers leave their profession after four years due to stress and other reasons. Some teachers fail to teach students skills that go beyond the tests because they’re so pressured to get their students ready for these exams. This amount of stress can lead to feelings of negativity towards school and learning in general as well as cause negative health issues. Standardized tests places a large amount of stress on both teachers and students.

Some people want more tests, or for the tests to stay the same. But I disagree. One of the things some people think is that teachers can use these test results to guide their instruction. This sounds like a great idea, but there is a few cons to it. One of the major cons is Test results aren’t available until the next year, so they are useless. So, when the students move to the next grade, they will not be able to see what they specifically did