Smarter Ways to Test Our Potential Youths Standardized testing has been used in the United States for years while its role in education has expanded by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Standardized testing was created to promote equality within the education system; to treat and teach all student the same. The use of this test was also meant to measure the students’ progress in math and reading, as well as to determine a student promotion to the next grade; but at what cost? Preparation for standardized tests is almost twenty-four-seven, every year from third grade to eighth grade. Preparation that takes up valuable learning time in school. Preparation that is a waste to the students’ future in college and life beyond school. Standardized testing seem to demand so much from schools; not to mention its impending threat on schools to label them with bad reputations or closing them down. With such a threat breathing down the necks of the schools encouragement to cut quality education to meet the standards to ‘survive’ is tempting. Teachers would teach primary to the favor of the test and, if given the opportunity, schools would scandalously claim and put their low-scoring students in special education programs to exempt them from taking the test. Standardized testing is damaging our biggest number one priority; which is our education, an important factor that strongly impacts the children of our future! Standardized testing takes so much from students, schools, and
Currently, standardized tests do not improve the education of students in America. Standardized testing is not an accurate measure of student’s knowledge because they are designed to test an extremely broad amount of students who do not have the same educational background. This makes it incredibly difficult to test students across the world on the same level and expect their scores to reflect their education. Standardized testing, by definition, is any test containing the same questions that is administered to a vast group of people for the purpose of comparing different student’s test scores. This issue is important because it affects the entire academic community, positively and negatively. Therefore, all teachers, students, school staff, and test administrators have some involvement with standardized testing. The vast majority of people in America have taken a standardized test sometime in their life, which makes these tests vital in the
To many students standardized testing has become another part of schooling that is dreaded. Standardized testing has been a part of school since the nineteen-thirties; in those days it was used as a way to measure students that had special needs. Since the time that standardized test have been in American schools there has been many programs that have placed an importance on the idea of standardized testing such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Evans 1). Over the years the importance of standardized testing has increased tremendously and so has the stakes, not only for teachers but also students. All states in the United States of America have state test in order to measure how much students learn, and help tell how well the
Ever since standardized testing started being used as a way to evaluate the intelligence of students and the teachers’ ability to educate, the standard of actual education has been diminished immensely. Standardized testing is used in most public and private schools to analyze students’ knowledge. It has affected the way in which students learn and has corrupted the methods teachers use to educate. In some cases, English-Learning and disabled students face discrimination from teachers since teachers have more responsibility to have a high number of passing students. Some countries around the world don’t use standardized tests to rank their students or schools and yet they have been successful. Standardized tests are not efficient on making students learn, they should not be used to evaluate students’ knowledge.
Standardized tests are exams that are supposed to measure a child’s academic knowledge but have long been a controversial subject of discussion. Although it is one method to see how a child is performing, is it the best method? Standardized testing can be biased or unfair, inhibit both the teacher’s and the children’s creativity and flexibility, affect funding for schools, cause untested subjects to be eliminated from the curriculum, and cause anxiety for children and teachers.
Standardized tests are unnecessary because they are excruciating to the minds of many innocent students. Each year, the tests get tougher and stricter until the students cannot process their own thoughts. The tests become torturous to the minds of those only starting in the world of tests. The students already battling in the war are continuing to fall deeper and deeper into the world of uncreativity and narrowness. As the walls narrow in on them, they are lost and unable to become innovative thinkers. Moreover, the implementation of standardized tests into the public school systems of the United States of America has controversially raised two different views –the proponents versus the opponents in the battle of the effectiveness of
1.1 Explain why working in partnership with others is important for children and young people
Standardized testing is not an effective way to test the skills and abilities of today’s students. Standardized tests do not reveal what a student actually understands and learns, but instead only prove how well a student can do on a generic test. Schools have an obligation to prepare students for life, and with the power standardized tests have today, students are being cheated out of a proper, valuable education and forced to prepare and improve their test skills. Too much time, energy, and pressure to succeed are being devoted to standardized tests. Standardized testing, as it is being used presently, is a flawed way of testing the skills of today’s students.
The use of standardized examinations have long been debated in American society. In fact, the last several years have seen an immense shift from the prioritization of standardized testing to more holistic measurements of student achievement. Despite this shift, many school districts across the nation and college/university entrance requirements still place a significant, if not pivotal, emphasis on test-taking and standardized exam results. Throughout this paper, I will explore 1) the history of standardized testing, 2) arguments for and against its practice, as well as 3) situate the consequences of its use in one of the three philosophical goals of schooling. All of this will subsequently paint an investigation into the purpose of schooling in American society.
“Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation” (1). Many people believe that school isn’t for everyone, and whoever goes is privileged for doing so. Countless people in the world today do not attend college, and this is mainly due to an influence of those in their family. Perhaps they are unsupportive of higher education, their parents and family members may view their entry into college as a break in the family system rather than a continuation of their schooling and higher learning. Most of the first-generation students decide to apply to colleges, because they aspire to jobs which require degrees. However, unlike some students whose parents have earned a degree, they often seek out college to bring honor to their families, and to ensure they make a decent amount of money for their future.
What once began as a simple test administered to students yearly to measure understanding of a particular subject has, as Kohn (2000) has stated, “Mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole” (p.1). Today’s students are tested to an extent that is unparalleled in not only the history of our schools, but to the rest of the world as well. Step into any public school classroom across the United States and it will seem as if standardized testing has taken over the curriculum. Day after day teachers stress the importance of being prepared for the upcoming test. Schools spend millions of dollars purchasing the best test preparation materials, sometimes comes at the cost of other important material. Although test
“Our educational goal [is] the production of caring, competent, loving, lovable people” . The students found in the schools across the United State are the future of America. They are the doctors, teachers, business people, lawyers and many other roles, that will be out in the workforce in the years to come. What they learn in school will impact them immensely; it is the responsibility of a teacher to give students the best education in order to ensure the common good of the future. It is essential for students to not only learn content matter, but also the skills to enable them to participate in a democracy. Due to standardized testing, the emphasis of education has become on score and rankings rather than learning. A standardized test does not look at the whole student, the scores provided are on a very narrow aspect of education. In the classroom, there are countless ways for teachers to assess the student as a whole person not as just a score. Standardized tests scores should not be the sole criteria for determining a student’s academic achievement.
A very current and ongoing important issue happening within the education system is standardized testing. A standardized test is any examination that's administered and scored in a calculated, standard manner. There are two major kinds of standardized tests: aptitude tests and achievement tests. Standardized aptitude tests predict how well students might perform in some subsequent educational setting. The most common examples are the SAT’s and the ACT’s. The SAT and the ACT attempt to estimate how well high school students will perform in college. But standardized test scores are what citizens and school board members rely on when they evaluate a school's effectiveness. Nationally, five such tests are in use: California Achievement Tests,
Within this paper we hope to answer lingering questions about the effectiveness of standardized testing in schools. Throughout our research we found many instances and sources of information to help us reach our goal. Standardized Testing had grown to play an enormous role in controversy concerning the Education system within the past decade. Hopefully throughout our paper it can be understood as to why this occurred and what can be done about it.
Should K-12 student surveys of their teachers be used to determine whether they get a boost in salary or be judged effective or ineffective? Based on surveys given to students about their teachers over the past decade, student judgments about their teachers are highly correlated with test scores. These questions measure classroom control and the degree to which teachers challenge students to work harder with academic content and skills. The New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit based in Brooklyn that recruits and trains new teachers, last school year used student surveys to evaluate 460 of its 1,006 teachers. In higher education, students have evaluated their professors’ teaching and course content for decades. Controversial or not in higher education, reform-driven policymakers and foundation officials, eager to find another metric beyond unstable end-of-year test scores that simply and inexpensively judges K-12 teacher performance, look to researchers to quantify student perceptions of how and what their teachers teach. Not, however, if student perceptions of teaching are sliced and diced to fit into little boxes that can be checked off by principals and superintendents to determine teacher effectiveness and pay.
Throughout the novel Friendswood, many different perspectives of one town are approached and described through separate narrators in the story. Each character brings a different point of view, looking at the events occurring throughout the novel in many different ways. Because of these different narrations and points of view, the reader is able to learn more about each character individually, learning how and why the events affect that character. Even though Dex has a smaller role in the novel, the young high school student brings his own interpretation of events in a very different way than many of the other characters. Dex is a unique character because he does not seem to have any personal connections to the events that occurred in Rosemont years before. However, despite his lack of connections to past events, Dex’s character is unique and substantial to the plot. His personality and actions throughout the novel are directly influenced by his parent’s divorce, forcing him to take on mature responsibilities at a young age.