The Use Of Standardized Testing In English Language Learners

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.

The current uproar over standardized testing is being battled by cultural minorities who demand equality. “Cultural bias” refers to the idea that the differences between scores of racial and ethnic groups are caused by a bias towards the “American-born, English-speaking majority” of the US population. From the simple IQ test to the SAT, standardized testing has become an unfair predictor and artificial decision maker for this country’s minority, especially those newly immigrated. Economic and cultural biases leave for little opportunity for these examinees to perform well, partially because of the failure of the government to prepare and assimilate minority students.

In the United States, striving for perfection and a great education for the students becomes a necessity. With all the other pressures found in society, high expectations of a standard education among students prevail, specifically hindering the chances of getting accepted into the dream college. Nowadays, most colleges use the grades from multiple standardized tests, such as the SAT’s or ACT’s, as a way to evaluate an individual's knowledge against other students. Although usually mandatory, standardized tests overwhelm students with distressing outcomes, rather than beneficial effects, creating a standard system of unreliable measurements of a student’s performance and unfair discrimination against the non English speaking or students with

Standardized tests within today’s American Education have become a policy, creating vast and long tests to comprehend each student's knowledge over their years of education within American society. While there are positive and negative effects of using these standardized tests to assess students’ needed fundamentals of education in terms of standards, the validity of these tests always come into question, considering that so many high school graduates are applying for college. This calls into question whether we should keep using these tests, or abandon them all together. It makes one beg the question: To what extent are the criterion of standardized tests valid in predicting collegiate educational success? Due to the inefficiencies of standardized

With the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 came a requirement for local and state educational providers to be accountable for the academic progress of all children in their care including English language learners. This paper will examine two common assessments used by states and districts to meet the requirement of this legislation: WIDA's ACCESS for ELLs and Ballard and Tighe's IPT test. Both of these standard-based tests are used for similar purposes, but they have some differences too, namely that one tests BICS and general CALP, while the other tests a wider range of academic domain language.

Imagine walking into class the day of a school-wide exam and your teacher offer you two choices, A.) Play fun games outside with your friends or , B.) Take a boring an extremely long test. If your answer was A then get ready to put down that #2 pencil and pick up that bouncy ball. In almost every school, both local and international students are required to take standardized test and exams. The results of these tests are used for a number of reasons. Many children miss out on a wide variety of academic opportunities because of the results of the test that deemed them not proficient,based on their results of a standardized test. Unfortunately, a A standardized test has been a stressor to students academic lives.

Another conflicting viewpoint detrimental to United States education systems are problems concerning the standardized test established by the No Child Left behind Act. Based on the stipulations the states are allowed to “set their own standards and write their own standardized NCLB tests, states can compensate for inadequate student performance by setting very low standards and making tests unusually easy.”(White, 2015). Furthermore, “The law requires the inclusion of English language learners (ELLs) in its assessment mandates; accordingly, these students must make annual progress as measured on standardized tests of both English language proficiency and academic content.” (Menken) Standardized testing makes it extremely difficult for English

Because of the pressure on the teachers, they would focus more on teaching students how to take the tests rather than what they are supposed to teach in terms of academic achievements (Sacks 44). Standardized testing seems to turn these schools into the ones only for testing. Another issue with standardized testing is that it does not fit every race of students equally well. In Michele Phillips’s article, “Standardized Tests Aren’t Like T-Shirts: One Size Doesn’t Fit All,” Phillips claims that standardized tests are unfair to the students who don’t have English as their primary language. Moreover, standardized tests seem biased because they’re under the standard of the norms of White middle-class America (Phillips). Due to these linguistic and cultural differences, standardized testing is merely a challenge rather than an encouragement to students who are not in the White upper and middle- class groups. Both Sacks and Phillips claim that in order to help these students to succeed academically, reducing standardized testing is needed. Decreasing standardized testing will reduce the negative effects that it brings which will then improve the equality of the American schools and help the students from lower classes and minority races to be more comfortable with studying.

Research shows that the use of standardized testing has spanned centuries, some of the earlier studies include data from the early 1900’s. According to Frazier (2009), “there is a significant difference in scores on standardized tests when students have completed a technology education program”. This study shows a correlation between the use of technology within the school system and achievement on standardized tests. Students that are exposed to technology education are more likely to do well on standardized tests.

According to the standards set by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), test bias “. . . is said to arise when deficiencies in a test itself or the manner in which it is used result in different meanings for scores earned by members of different identifiable subgroups” (Price, pg. 571). It should be taken into consideration that those subgroups do not share the same experiences and/or have the cultural background to meet the needs of the standardized test questions when it comes to abstract wording such as: success, failure, courage, and comparison of life in the city versus life in a small town. For example, a student living in a small town in the outskirts of El Paso, with limited financial means, mass transportation, and social lives cannot compare with that of students living in New York City when it comes to viewing life and sharing their life experiences. A question on the standardized test can be as simple as “Can you read the writing on the wall” if you do not attend college? To a LEP limited English proficient) student, “the writing on the wall” is a metaphor in which they cannot relate because of their language barrier yet, they are expected to write a persuasive essay on this

Most schools require students to take standardized tests at the end of the school year in order to continue on to the next grade; tests that are commonly given in the English language. The tests are comprised of passages that consist of grade level vocabulary, lower level vocabulary and in some cases higher level vocabulary that even English speakers themselves fail to understand. For the several students that are not fluent in the English language and/or can hardly speak the bare minimum of the English language, success is not an option; which means that these students will be held back a grade level simply because the test was not administered or written in a language which they could comprehend. This article provides guidelines for testing

The five peer-reviewed articles, in this paper, investigate how changes in language acquisition are measured and how new regulations, in the United States academic standards, affect test practices and test development. New educational ideals have been developed and put in place to help teachers accomplish the task of content evaluation during final exams. English learners are the first to acknowledge that they face a lot of challenges and many of them are due to the inability of language teachers to comprehend their cultural and unique difficulties that arise from the very different approaches in teaching that western educators employ.

There are not many advantages for English language learners whereas standardized testing is concerned. Teachers will have to create individualized ways in monitoring students’ progress to gain true assessment results.

Graduating high school or moving on to the next grade depends on the ability to pass one test. If the ESL student is not able to perform correctly or if they are able to demonstrate their understanding on subject like English or math it can affect them profoundly. The test is not an accurate reflection of the knowledge of the student.

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is an international standardised test for non-native English language speakers, which assesses English proficiency. This testing system was created in 1980 by the University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and the British Council and has been picked up, revised and redeveloped into an international assessment by many countries including Australia. For those who want to enroll in universities or work as professionals in an English-speaking country, one must complete the IELTS Academic version. For immigration to Australia and New Zealand, it is a requirement to take the IELTS General Training version of the test.