Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Education Standardized testing Standardized testing “No issue in the U.S. Education is more controversial than (standardized) testing. Some people view it as the linchpin of serious reform and improvement, others as a menace to quality teaching and learning” (Phelps). A tool that educators use to learn about students and their learning capabilities is the standardized test. Standardized tests are designed to give a common measure of a student’s performance. Popular tests include the SAT, IQ tests, Regents Exams, and the ACT. “Three kinds of standardized tests are used frequently in schools: achievement, diagnostic, and aptitude” (Woolfolk 550). Achievement tests can be used to help a teacher assess a student’s strengths and weaknesses in a particular subject. Diagnostic tests are typically given to elementary school students when learning problems are suspected. Aptitude tests are designed to predict how a student will perform in the future. For example, the SAT predicts performance in the first year of college. Standardized tests give educators a standard measure or “yardstick” because such a large number of students across the country take the same test. These tests are used to tell how well school programs are doing or to give a picture of the skills and abilities of students. Standardized tests; however, are problematic at all ages and levels of schooling. Standardized aptitude tests measure students’ abilities to learn in school, how well they are likely to succeed in future education. Rather than measuring knowledge of subjects taught in school, these tests measure a broad range of abilities or skills that are considered important to succeed in school. The classroom setting and teacher are the key to assessment. “Pressure to produce higher scores leads teachers to focus on material that will be covered by the tests and to exclude everything else. The curriculum is thereby narrowed, which means that some subjects are ignored. Within those that are taught, lower order thinking skills are emphasized. As a result, test scores get inflated while real learning suffers” (Phelps). Performance based assessment guarantees an increased understanding of the growth of individual child. Such understanding reduces the need for currently used standardized tests. Standards for Education and Psychological Testing (American Psychological Association) states the definite standards for assessment by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. It is made up of four major parts: standards for particular applications, technical standards for test construction and evaluation, professional standards for test use, and standards for administrative procedures. A test that is technically adequate meets the criteria for validity, reliability, and norms. Validity is “the appropriateness, meaningfulness, and usefulness of the specific inferences” that can be made from the test results. (American Psychological Association 9) Validity is the degree to which a test measures what it is intended to measure. Reliability is the extent to which the test results are dependable and consistent. Unrelated to the purpose of the test, errors in measurement can be viewed through inconsistencies in the performance, motivation, or interests of students being tested. Norms can be shown in age or grade equivalence, standard scores, and percentiles. They are generally shown in charts showing the performance groups of students who have taken the test. Norms show the comparison of the performance of new groups of test takers with the samples of students on whom the test was standardized. Goodwin and Driscoll (59-60) note that standardized tests have the following qualities: They provide a “systematic procedure for describing behaviors, whether in terms of numbers or categories.” They have an established format and set materials. Also, they present the same tasks and require the same response modes from all test takers. At first glance, the reasoning behind today’s standardized tests sounds reasonable. In theory, they give every student a solid picture of achievement and an equal opportunity for advancement in education. However, standardized testing is problematic at all ages and levels of schooling. The problem with standardized tests is that they tend to kill off the kind of education that matters most. After years of memorization of subject matter and tests, who were once intellectually excited grade school children have become either bored or grade obsessed high school students. Anxiety over upcoming tests and a constant concern for higher grades replaces the excitement of accomplishing real tasks and exhibiting real skills. “The great majority of standardized tests are marketed by commercial test publishers, who have prepared them for use in a broad array of educational institutions in many different settings. This means that they are based on educational objectives common to such diverse schools, and rarely will these common objectives coincide with the specific objectives of the individual classroom teacher or project director” (Goodwin and Driscoll 60). Testing experts claim that standardized tests actually interfere with learning and student achievement by educators that use them. “Critics…state that these tests measure disjointed facts and skills that have no use or meaning in the real world. Often tests questions do not match the curriculum of schools, so the tests cannot measure how well students have learned the curriculum” (Woolfolk 541). There are many reasons for caution when dealing with standardized tests. Reasons for caution in the use of tests include the possible loss of a student’s self esteem; the distortion of curriculum; the lowering of expectations; and both teaching and learning. “Due to perceived pressures from administrators and parents, teachers may ‘teach to the test’” (Wiseman 57). Some teachers let the tests guide their instruction and curriculum because they are only concerned with the student’s performance on tests. Standardized tests may or may not relate directly to what students have been taught or evoke student’s interest. Students who are cooperative learning are not allowed to talk during testing and students who are accustomed to working problems out slowly are plagued with the time constraint standardized tests have. Another downfall of standardized testing is when students are labeled slow learners because of test results; their educational opportunities often become limited and unchallenging. “A danger of these tests is the role they may play in developing students’ perceptions about their ability to learn. Teachers may expect less from students who do not perform well on a test” (Wiseman 57). Standardized tests should not be the only basis for a teacher’s curriculum and instruction. They also should not be the sole predictor of a student’s intellectuality and future. “Standardized tests generally have questionable ability to predict one’s academic success” (Sacks). Not all high school seniors are required to take the SAT or ACT. Instead some take entrance exams given by a college or whatever entrance exam or assignment a college will require for admission. “Numerous studies show that the SAT scores explain just about 16 percent of the variation in actual freshman grades. A student’s high school record is the best predictor of performance in the first year of college; further, the SAT, when combined with high school grades, adds only modestly to the predictive power of high school grades alone” (Sacks). This proves that standardized tests are not the greatest assessment of a student’s knowledge of subject matter or greatest predictor of a student’s future. A student may simply be a bad test taker, but may have a high GPA. The SAT is a nationally standardized measure, where as a grade point average is not. A student may receive a respectively high GPA through hard work, while another may simply just get by through opting to take easy courses in high school. “…the SAT’s impact is often overstates. The overwhelmingly majority of colleges are not selective, so a low SAT score will rarely keep a student out of college. Even at the most selective college, the SAT is seldom used alone by college admissions staff to make decisions” (Phelps). The American people have consistently advocated greater use of standardized student testing, and more states now than even administer standardized tests on a regular basis. Yet, such tests also evoke protest from many educators and testing experts. The basic argument made by those in opposition to standardized testing is that standardized tests are counterproductive. Meaning that instead of leading to stronger academic achievement, it is said to interfere with teaching and learning. Teachers should use test results to improve their instruction, not to justify lower expectations or to stereotype students. Bibliography: Works Cited American Psychological Association. Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1985 Goodwin, W.L., and Driscoll, L.A. Handbook for Measurement and Evaluation in Education. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980 Phelps, R.P. “Why Testing Experts Hate Testing.” Fordham Report, Jan. 1999: Available online: http://www.ed.excellence.net/library/phelps.htm Sacks, P. Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What we Can do to Change it. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, Feb. 2000: Available online: http://www.fairtest.org.k12/psacks.html Wiseman, D.L., Cooner, D.D., and Knight, S.L. Becoming a Teacher in a Field-Based Setting: an Introduction to Education and Classrooms. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999 Woolfolk, A. Educational Psychology. Needham Word Count: 1380
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