Strategies for Test Taking and Their Effects Essay

Henry L. Roediger III believes that “testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it” (Roediger pg. 1). If we stop forcing students to shove information down

The Washington Post published the story “2015 Superintendent of the Year: High-stakes testing is the ‘fool’s gold’ of accountability” by Valerie Strauss on August 27 about one superintendent’s discontent with constant “high stakes testing”. Strauss was covering the story of man who was named the “2015 American Association of School Administrators National Superintendent of the Year”, Philip D. Lanoue who is the superintendent of the Clarke County School District in Georgia, which is one of the most impecunious districts in the state. Lanoue believes that the constant pattern of standardized testing in schools is completely different from what he refers to as actual “meaningful assessment” and considers the tests to be unbeneficial for students.

Today, it can be observed that society has shifted education drastically from the time schools were constituted, to now. Throughout history, schools have gone from private, where only the elite can attend, to public schools where virtually anyone can attend. One of the factors that goes along with education is standardized testing. Frederick J. Kelly, father of the standardized test, once said, “These tests are too crude to be used, and should be abandoned.” Not only has this shift occurred within education itself, but it has occurred within the testing concepts found within standardized testing so much so that the founder of these tests has chosen to give up on it.

Preparations for tests should ideally begin much earlier than shortly before the actual test taking period. Indeed, many students perform dismally in their tests because of their failure to understand this and many other principles of test and exam preparation. In addition to discussing how students should prepare for tests, this text will also identify the various strategies which should be embraced by students during test taking in an attempt to enhance performance.

Nichols, Glass, and Berliner (2012) states that “high stakes testing is the process of attaching significant consequences to standardized test performance with the goal of incentivizing

Standardized tests do a wonderful job of supplying the evidence needed to make norm-referenced interpretations of students' knowledge and skills in relationship to those of students nationally. The educational usefulness of those interpretations is considerable. However, the achievement is not the same as learning. When we focus on achievement, we are talking about the test scores and we could miss out on whether or not the students are actually learning.

For 10 years, I was the one testing the students, teaching strategies and finding new ones to help students study. Suddenly, I found myself returning to school and the anxiety, stress, lack of time, and just all the unknowns seemed to overwhelm my life. The last couple of years I have learned to incorporate strategies that work best for me, but there is always room for improvement and strengthening. Learning, study and test taking skills are some of the most important things to have when furthering your education. Upon reading Strategies for Test Success by Linda Anne Silvestri, I was able to scrutinize some of my weaknesses, reevaluate my learning style, and look at some new test taking strategies while assessing

This study also stated that, “every standardized test has a certain “error of measurement” which means that a given score could actually be off by several points in either direction. High stakes, however, have single scores as the cut-off point. Those scores do not account for the inaccuracies that all test publishers acknowledge”(azstandards). There have been many studies in which students take the same test on different days, and their score varies greatly. High stakes testing does not give any consideration to these errors.

Standardized testing is an overemphasized aspect of the modern education system. All states use some form of standardized testing, and in recent years, it has become a deciding factor in a student’s ability to graduate. But, how effective are these tests? They aren’t. They don’t test a student’s aptitude, they only test the ability for a student to hold information, not apply it. State testing must be removed on the grounds that it inhibits the critical thinking abilities of younger generations, and it misrepresents a student’s aptitude for learning.

There are many different types of standardized tests used in schools around the country, but “high-stakes” achievement tests in US elementary and secondary schools have produced

Throughout this paper, I will be discussing how important high stakes testing is to our country. First, I will show how these tests prevent students from moving on to the next grade level or graduate without the skills necessary. Secondly, I will discuss

          The test taking tutorial taught me different strategies for different types of test. For multiple choice test I have learned to eliminate options that are unrelated to the question. I learned to do that because I would sometimes just pick what sounded good and not really read the rest of the choices available. I also had a problem with essay test. One strategy I would use that is to check my answer for grammar, spelling, and completion. I used to not do that because I felt rushed, but when I would get my test back it would be all marked up with corrections that needed to be made, resulting in a bad grade. On matching test I learned to single out the correct answers by going down the left column and figuring out the questions that I knew and leaving the ones that I wasn’t to sure on, and that would make It easier to single out the right answers.

High-stakes testing is an educational strategy that affects students, teachers, and society as a whole. The topic of high-stakes testing has been supported and discredited by many educators, politicians, and citizens. Nationally, schools are using high-stakes testing for a variety of reasons. The American Educational Research Association discussed high-stakes testing and issued a statement that read:

According to a Handbook for Improving Test Construction Skills by Indiana University, there are couple of problems keep classroom tests from being accurate measures of students’ achievement. Some of the problems are “Test content did not reflect the material discussed in class,”3 ”Too little feedback is provided,”3 and “Ambiguous questions.”3

Learners do tests not only to get a mark, but also to show themselves and the teacher how well they have mastered the new knowledge they have been learning, that is, to provide feedback. It is relevant to mention that most testing should be done automatically and almost unconsciously by teacher and learners as the course develops, the most valuable feedback on learning being supplied by the learners' current performance in class.