Standardized Testing In The Education System

In the mid to late 1800s, the secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts, Horace Mann, began the standardized testing age of America’s school systems. According to Thomas C. Hunt, et al., “A standardized achievement test is a test that measures students’ knowledge of a domain of related content…. These achievement tests put emphasis on what has been learned by the students, and students are scored as either proficient or not proficient in the content area” (Hunt, et al 888). Standardized testing was very well-liked in the past and still is by some people today. Many education systems encourage the continuation of these standardized tests because it measures how much knowledge a student has gained and how well the teacher’s instruction has taught the student throughout the year. Many teachers and administrators also approve of the

A 2007 study, conducted by the Center for Education Policy, reported that 44% of school districts reduced the time spent on science, social studies, and the arts by an average of 145 minutes, in order to focus on math and reading skills. Because, of standardized testing, schools compromise time for other subjects. As a result, standardized testing fails to improve student achievement and education in other subjects. Similarly, five years after No Child Left Behind Act, researchers found that 62% of the sampled schools increased the amount of time spent on math and language arts in elementary schools. Standardized tests primarily test for mathematics and language arts. Consequently, most educators lose focus on other subjects, including science, social studies, and the arts. Narrowing the curriculum fails to prepare students for further education in other

Standardized testing has not helped student achievement in America (Is the use of standardized test improving education in America? 1). Ever since students have started using standardized testing, America has fell in many areas of academics. One area is math where America used to be eighteenth in the world is now thirty-first (Is the use of standardized test improving education in America? 1). This proves that testing has not helped America improve in academic achievement, but has actually made a decline.

From first grade to college, every student faces the nightmare: a test. The groans, rolled-back eyes and anxiety are all symptoms of a test-stressed generation. However, high school students are impacted the most because colleges do not look at test scores comprehensively. They only look at the high scores and ignore the low scores. Ever since the College Board was created in 1899, colleges have used the Board’s number one test to assess a high school student’s abilities. The colleges are only concerned with their reputation, not about the quality of a student’s academic strength.

Since the turn of the century, the alphabetic letters that have defined schooling have changed. The days of the A’s, B’s, and C’s are long gone; it is now the era of a slew of initialisms and anagrams that have completely distorted the curriculum. Indeed, standardized testing has warped what was once the natural learning process, rooted in curiosity, into bubble-filling boot camp. The industries that manufacture these tests are compromising the core values of education. Instead of having teachers who are free to focus on educating students about material that matters, we now have teachers worried about how their students will score so as not to count negatively towards a teacher’s evaluation. As a student who has been in public education from

For many years America has been called a world leader and sometimes even a superpower among countries worldwide, but one thing Americans fail to realize is that America is anything but a world leader in education. A study was done regarding the top ten education systems in the world and the research showed, “In 2014, Edudemic did an analysis of countries and their education success or lack thereof and found the U.S. ranked 14th” (Lepi). Research also found that, “Finland came in at number one in 2012 and an interesting fact came to the surface; Finland does not participate in any standardized testing” (Lepi). Another statistic that is eye-opening is that, “Following the passage of NCLB on Jan. 8, 2002, annual state spending

Schools should not have standardized tests because, kids are to stressed and it waist to much time when kids could be learning something new. After my research I have came to the conclusion that there are many different opinions and concerns about weather standardized testing should be required or not. Each opinion has some logic but there are just some thing that don’t make much sense. Some people see it as a competition between students to see who can get a better score. Also if some people don’t get the score that they wanted it could put their self confidence down and make them not want to try as hard next time. They feel like these tests prove how smart they are to their parents, students, and friends.

Another argument is that “School districts and teachers should have the autonomy to create their own standards and curricula at the local level, rather than being held to national criteria and impossible standardized tests (Embrace The Common Core).” One of the most controversial issues in public education, the topic of standardized tests has actually taken on a life of its own.

Former president of the American Educational Research Association, W. James Popham, defines standardized tests as "any test that's administered, scored, and interpreted in a standard, predetermined manner"(qtd. in ProCon). Standardized testing was first introduced to the American education system in the mid-1800s. The Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the reauthorization of the Johnson administration’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which emphasized equal access to education, high standards, and accountability. The revised law increased the federal government's role in education, in terms of holding schools accountable for student academic performance. The result of the 2002 induction of No Child

In 2001, the No Child Left Behind federal law was passed, which required schools to annually access the students’ achievement by high-stake standardized testing, which included reading, math, and science. Besides reporting the individual scores, schools had to also report the scores by race, ethnicity, disability, social class, and the language primarily used in the student’s home.

Children are frequently taught to be themselves because we are all different. People do not look, talk, or even think the same as one another. To insure children are receiving the best education possible, teachers must consider these differences and teach for various learning styles. One child may process information more efficiently when the teacher uses visuals such as pictures, while another student may learn better by listening to his or her teacher speak. To confirm students are learning and being taught the required information that is provided by the state, students in the United States take part in standardized testing: “A standardized achievement test is designed to provide norm-referenced interpretations of student achievement in

Knowledge is one of the most difficult things to gauge. Measuring for knowledge can be done in so many different ways that it seems impossible to say which one is the most efficient method. However, in the public school system, knowledge and education are the products being consumed and it is up to teachers and school boards to determine whether or not students are gaining the correct amount of knowledge they need in order to survive and thrive in the real world. While knowledge is measured in multiple different ways throughout school and university, perhaps the most primary means relied upon to measure knowledge is the standardized test. Standardized tests are thoroughly vetted tests that are comprised of questions that are used to determine

Modern day schooling and its methods of assessing students are the issues presented in this paper. Schools today evaluate students mainly through standardized testing, which is not the right way to evaluate a person’s intellectual abilities and skills. Lisa Belkin, a senior columnist for the Huffington Post, believes that grades have taken prominence over the love of learning, which she thinks is the most important part of school because of the benefit that knowledge provides to a person in their lifetime. She also mentions the effect that grades have on the parent/child relationship, since grades become a goal for both of them and the pursuit of knowledge is left behind.

Considerable research suggests that not only the tests themselves but also the manner in which indigenous students are assessed contributes in important ways to the performance gap between AI/AN students and their White peers (see, e.g., Estrin & Nelson-Barber, 1995). For instance, the very notion of testing students’ knowledge on-demand, out of context is antithetical to common cultural practices among AI/AN communities (and PI communities as well); yet, such students are routinely asked to demonstrate their learning in these ways, particularly on standardized tests. In fact, all elements of assessment—its design, administration, interpretation, and use—have not adequately attended to the ways in which cultural and linguistic differences affect

Our education system must reduce the amount of standardized test used because they are ineffective in determining a student’s overall achievement; they waste an extensive amount of time. The importance of this educational issue is taken lightly even though it plays a significant role in our countries development in areas such as the economy, politics, and our advancing basis of knowledge surrounding science, math, and reading/language arts. The issue of these tests affects teachers, students, parents, and the community in a variety of ways; however, many argue whether they are truly beneficial to the future generation. I will be discussing the attribution these tests have on our teachers, students, and how this also affects our overall knowledge in the subjects these tests are designed to help us master.