Individualized Learning
Among the many flaws that currently trouble our education system there is one that vividly stands out to me, and that is how our current system is threatening individualism. Our system is oriented towards being efficient to large groups of students and forgets to take into account how people have different interests, ideas, and ways of learning. Instead of being so centered on the amount of students that are being educated, its main concern should be the quality of education each student as an individual is receiving. Something that would help improve our education system is focusing on a much more individualized way of learning. An individualized approach to education would promote progress and diversity. It is
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This information about students would improve the way teachers educate them, they would have a better understanding of students and could find a more effective way for them to learn.
Standardized testing is a great example of how our schools don’t take into account students’ individualities. It’s not realistic to think that you can fit something as subjective as the knowledge and/or learning abilities of a person into a “standard” test. My number one concern with these tests starts with the name itself. The word “standard” implies that there is an established way to determine how much a student has learned. It also assumes that all the students taking these tests possess the same knowledge. Requiring everyone to answer the same set of questions and expecting the exact identical answer would mean that all the people taking these tests think the same way. If this is the goal that our schools have then it is fair to say that we are in desperate need of a change.
As John Taylor Gatto said in his essay “Against school”: “What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right?”. With the way that our system works these are crucial questions that not only need to be asked but answered.
Standardized tests are a waste of time and money. Have you ever sat in a classroom for hours on end stressed until everyone in the school is done taking a test? If you said yes you have probably taken a standardized test. Students shouldn't have to take standardized tests anymore for the following reasons. Standardized test are very expensive and you would also have to pay for the prep. They are also unreliable and are not a good source for the administration and school. Lastly they cause a ton of stress on students, teachers, and the school.
In “A Rounded Version: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences”, Howard Gardner illustrates how there are a variety of intelligences. Gardner starts off with an example how IQ tests may predict achievement in school but may not predict achievement in life. After finding out certain parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions, such as “Broca’s Area” which is responsible for sentence production, Gardner proposes the existence of multiple intelligences. Multiple studies later led him to propose seven distinct intelligences; Musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Each intelligence has certain classifications. According to Gardner’s classifications, I realized my intelligences are bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, and intrapersonal.
When people think of the education system, most can say that there are some problems, though they might not be able to pinpoint what needs to change first. If you ask most teachers, they will say that the first thing that needs to be changed in the schooling system to help the students more is the standardized testing. They will say that while it can be helpful it has a lot of faults and needs to be updated or changed to help its students. Standardized testing has often been a topic for discussion, between parents and people in the schooling system. It seems that a lot of people either hate standardized testing for not giving every child a chance to succeed, or love it for being a fair way to test whether a child knows what they need to know at their age. There have been many articles, books, and documentary’s debating on whether or not standardized testing is doing more harm then good. There was a comic made that shows the brutality and bluntness of what standardized testing is really like. Standardized Testing causes too much stress by putting unfair expectations on teens and doesn’t give every single student the chance to succeed.
Would you like to take a test that is unfair, expensive, and unreliable? Chances are you already have. Standardized testing in schools is not only bad for the students, but also bad for our country’s future. Some might think standardized testing is a good thing, because it is the only way to measure all students the same across the country. However, this thought is wrong for many reasons.
Don’t all students hate standardized tests. They waste lots of time and don’t influence your grade so then what’s the point of them. I think that students shouldn’t take standardized tests. First of all students take the test in May and don’t get the results until September so the test doesn’t do much. Lots of teachers also only teach to the test meaning they only prepare them to pass the test. Students might know the content but because of test anxiety they might not be able to show it on the test.
Standardized testing is not made to test every student. These tests often ask one sided, bias questions. Claims have been brought against standardized tests in court due to bias. How are they supposed to measure the ability of every student when every student is different? Students learn differently and preform differently depending upon the type of test given. Some students are stronger with essay questions, some with matching, and some with true and false. Some students could not even know the material but get a multiple choice question right through process of elimination. How is this a fair way to measure knowledge? It is not fair to the students that actually study for these tests and know the information required.
Standardized testing has become a controversial topic in recent years, parents, students, teachers, principals and almost anyone who has a relationship with education is affected by this topic. People are either for or against standardized testing, some believe it is the only fair way to compare students others believe that the tests are too greatly stressed in school and are a nuisance to education. Standardized tests are stressed greatly, students learn testing material all year not focusing on anything else deemed unimportant by the test makers. Every student has the same amount of time and question on tests; they also are tested on the same subjects which the test makers believe are most important for children to learn. Standardized tests are used for many things such as ranking students on a national basis and government funding for schools.
By World War I, standardized testing was a common practice in the United States. It started with the Chinese, filling out tests to determine job status among the workers. During the industrial revolution, children left the farms and land to sit behind a desk, which caused the need to test a large amount of children quickly. The most common and well-known in our society are the SAT and ACT, which became a common rite of passage into universities in our society. There are many different views on standardized testing, creating a rift in our society, whether it has positive or negative impacts on our educational community and futures of children in our country.
Some would argue that standardized tests test everybody on the same level and it shows how well the students are taught by the teachers. This is true but not everybody learns on the same level and some don’t take tests very well.
Evaluating individual students through standardized tests is a poor means and should be replaced with performance-based assessments. An average student spends most of their early life inside a classroom, submitting to a sequence of tests and preparation for further exams to finally graduate and continue with further education, constantly struggling and striving for the highest marks. Through a strict series of standardized tests however, students instead form the idea that there is a single answer for all of the problems that face our world. You are taught not to think logically or creatively at all, but to mindlessly memorize. As a student, you lose interest in the different disciplines you
Standardized testing has been around for ages, but was not widely enforced until former President Bush put into law the No Child Left Behind Act. A standardized test is a major test that is administered to a large population of students that is graded in a standard manner. Recently, parents all over the country have been opting their children out of standardized testing, and for many justifiable reasons. Standardized testing should not be mandatory due to the fact that these tests do not accurately measure a student’s intelligence, they put students in a box, and they narrow the curriculum.
Imagine, a world where there was no more standardized testing. Standardized testing is definitely something that all schools use now. Standardized testing is traced back from “seventh-century China, when the government began administering written exams to select candidates for the civil service.”(Standardized Testing).Standardized testing in the pass to now is being used to classify students into their classes. (Standardized testing). Standardized testing should be eliminated from schools.
These tests, which in theory, are intended to judge a student’s growth and/or proficiency over time, in reality only measure how well a student is prepared for that specific test and not the actual material that is taught in the classroom. Standardized tests are for the most part aptitude tests, which sound beneficial, as they are evaluating a student’s ability to learn, but which actually measure how well the students can perform on a mind-numbing test that is most often not even loosely related to what
Standardized tests are annoying little things that students in schools all across the nation have to take every year. Though, if all the facts are taken into consideration, they do not really seem worth it, do they? Many people speculate whether or not they are actually measuring a student’s intelligence or anything like that. It seems that students do not necessarily have to learn the material, only memorize it for a short period of time. The question has to be raised, though-- what exactly qualifies a test to be a standardized test? Well, as described by The Glossary of Education Reform, there are two main things that make a test standardized. The first being that the test “...requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or
The theory of multiple intelligences was developed by Dr. Howard Gardner in 1983. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences is a critique of the standard psychological view of intellect: there is a single intelligence, adequately measured by IQ or other short answer tests. Instead, on the basis of evidence from disparate sources, the theory claims that human beings have a number of relatively discrete intellectual capacities. IQ tests assess linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, and sometimes spatial intelligence; they are a reasonably good predictor of who will do well in school. This is because humans have several other significant intellectual capacities (Harvard University).