Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate
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- Tests motivate students to perform better
- Repeated testing improve retention
- Minority and Disadvantaged Students
- Standardized testing important to determine prediction and selection for gifted programs
- Communicating Assessment of Academic Skills
- Standardized testing communicates an honest assessment of students’ skills
Academic AchievementStudents in schools with standardized tests achieve moreDebbie Thompson, 2009, Why Standardized Testing is Important in the Homeschool Environment, http://www.triangleeducationassessments.com/standardizedtesting.pdf DOA: 10-25-15 Thirdly, the most controversial and least known benefit of • standardized testing is that these tests can actually improve achievement. Richard P. Phelps has found an abundance of evidence demonstrating that students in schools with testing programs learn more than their counterparts in schools without testing mandates. An objective instrument and/or an outside source of assessment that is independent from teachers’ observations helps give a positive influence on teaching methods and children’s achievements. Teachers work harder to teach and students work harder to improve their scores or to show their accomplishments when they know they are being assessed.
Dr. Herbert Walberg is a senior fellow with The Heartland Institute and chairman of its Board of Directors. He is also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and a professor emeritus and University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on educational productivity and human accomplishments, August 1, 2011, Stop the War Against Standardize Tests, http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-submission/2011/08/01/stop-war-against-standardized-tests DOA: 10-25-15 The chief problem with U.S. schools apparently isn’t high dropout rates or underqualified teachers but standardized testing. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the push by parents and teachers in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Seattle and elsewhere to help students opt out of taking standardized tests. Members of this burgeoning anti-test movement fail to grasp testing’s valuable role in motivating and guiding students and teachers. Preparing young Americans for success in the global economy will require our schools to improve, not abolish, academic standards. Repeated testing improve retentionJessica Lahey, January 21, 2014, The Atlantic, “Students Should Be Tested More, Not less,” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/students-should-be-tested-more-not-less/283195/ DOA: 11-4-15 One researcher believes we are throwing a very effective learning tool out with our educational bathwater, and asserts that we should be testing students more, not less. Henry L. Roediger III, a cognitive psychologist at Washington University, studies how the brain stores, and later retrieves, memories. He compared the test results of students who used common study methods—such as re-reading material, highlighting, reviewing and writing notes, outlining material and attending study groups—with the results from students who were repeatedly tested on the same material. When he compared the results, Roediger found, “Taking a test on material can have a greater positive effect on future retention of that material than spending an equivalent amount of time restudying the material.” Remarkably, this remains true “even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information.” Minority and Disadvantaged StudentsTesting and reporting critical to ensure minority students receive adequate educationsSophie Quinton, January 23, 2015, National Journal, Is Standardized Testing a Civil Rights Issue?, http://www.nationaljournal.com/education/Is-Standardized-Testing-Civil-Rights-Issue DOA: 10-26-15 Nine teen groups, in clud ing the NAACP and the Chil dren’s De fense Fund, re cently re leased a state ment back ing the law’s core test ing re quire ment. “ES EA must con tin ue to re quire high-qual ity, an nu al statewide as sess ments for stu dents in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school,” Wade Hende r son, head of the Lead er ship Con fer ence on Civil and Hu man Rights, said at a Sen ate hear ing on Wed nes day. Tests should track stu dents’ pro gress to ward state stand ards, said Hende r son, and those stand ards have to align with what stu dents need to know to suc ceed in col lege or in the work force. Without data to show that stu dents are on track, it could be all too easy for dis ad vant aged chil dren to re ceive a sub stand ard edu ca tion. Gifted EnrollmentStandardized testing important to determine prediction and selection for gifted programsDebbie Thompson, 2009, Why Standardized Testing is Important in the Homeschool Environment, http://www.triangleeducationassessments.com/standardizedtesting.pdf DOA: 10-25-15 Secondly, standardized tests can improve prediction and selection for gifted programs, college, scholarships, or employment. Results can be highly effective in identifying needs of exceptional students. Standardized test scores are an additional source of information to assess academic performance and a student’s coursework, day-to-day test scores, homework, portfolios, and projects are other means of assessment. Achievement and ability tests can help describe a student’s learning abilities, academic accomplishments and give reliable predication for college success
Standardized testing is needed to communicate an honest assessment of academic skills to parentsLelac Almagor, September 2, 2014, Boston Review, The Good in Standardized Testing, http://bostonreview.net/us/lelac-almagor-finding-good-in-standardized-testing DOA: 10-25-15 I was still in college the first time someone cried in a parent-teacher conference with me. I had found a summer job at a free enrichment program for public school students. One of our students had just taken her first-ever standardized test, a practice version of the entrance examination for an elite magnet high school. She had scored in something like the fourteenth percentile. “I don’t understand,” her mother told me. “She does all her work in school. She does her homework. She does extra. I stay on top of her grades from the beginning. Always, she is getting As. Always, I think she is doing well.” Even then, at the beginning of my teaching career, I could see how this had happened. A quiet, diligent, well-behaved girl who turned in all her assignments—of course her grades were great. But she couldn’t read grade-level texts. Neither could many of her classmates at their majority-minority, wrong-side-of-the-tracks public school. Our summer program offered open enrollment and free enrichment; it tended to attract motivated students with motivated parents. The kids largely earned decent grades. Still, we took for granted that most would need remediation, extra support in basic skills they should have mastered long before middle school. Our strongest students would have qualified as just barely at grade level relative to national norms. What we called striving for excellence was really a pitched battle to break even. Without standardized testing—and lacking any other basis for comparison in their own educational experience—the students’ families had no way of knowing what I had assumed was obvious: that eighth graders on the other side of town were well past working on multisyllabic words or improper fractions. They had no way of knowing that their hardworking, solid-GPA kids were already far behind. Six months later, when President George W. Bush proposed the No Child Left Behind Act, which made standardized testing mandatory beginning in the third grade, I imagined this mom as the beneficiary. Someone should have told her years ago that her daughter wasn’t reading well. She should have known what her daughter’s teachers understood: that her daughter did well relative to her classmates but lagged behind the more privileged kids with whom she’d never go to school. She should have known that the gap would only widen over the years—that school wasn’t fixing the problem but allowing it to fester. I don’t know what she would have done about it. But she had a right to know.
Lee Binz, The HomeScholar is a dynamic homeschool speaker and author. She is an expert on how to craft a winning homeschool transcript, 7 Surprising Benefits of Standardized Testing, http://theendinmind.net/benefits-standardized-testing/ DOA: 10-25-15 One benefit of testing is to help you get a realistic perspective of your student’s academic abilities. Scores of parents have complained to me about how poorly their child is doing in school, only to be completely surprised by their results on a standardized test. One mother was flabbergasted to see that her child’s overall California Achievement Test score was 99%! The score helped her relax and get a little perspective on her concerns. We see our child’s failures up close and personal every single day. Testing also helps you assess your child’s relative strengths. As parents, we are tempted to dwell on our children’s weaknesses and we lose sight of their strengths. Constantly focusing on weaknesses keeps us from affirming their strengths – strengths they might not even realize they have. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 1.17 Mb. Share with your friends:
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