In the United States, especially in more recent years as a result of governmental movements—No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—educational success is determined based on standardized test scores. These tests have been formulated in an effort to monitor children’s education throughout the country to ensure that no matter the location, children are receiving the same quality of an education. Despite this appealing idea of equal education for all, the standardized tests are crushing children’s creativity and thirst for learning in many of the nation’s schools.
With such high pressures on test scores, many teachers find themselves teaching to the test as described in Unequal by Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality by Wayne Au (2008). Au describes how the ends determine the means, which in the case of standardized testing, means that teachers must teach students the information necessary for their students to succeed on the test. The problem comes, however, with the predetermined content of the tests. The content taught in classes is decided by the content of the test, as all other learning is “inefficient or wasteful” (Au, 2008).
In the film Standardized (Hornberger, 2013), a father tells the story of his 5th grade son receiving a failing grade on an essay assignment. When the parents and boy met with the teacher to discuss the grade, it became apparent that the boy was being penalized for not sticking with the predetermined pattern for essays of this nature, and he was using his own creative style to begin the essay. This boy is just one anecdote as to the penalty for creativity and self-expression in today’s schools. With so much riding on the tests and subsequent scores, there is no longer room for this individuality in the American classroom.
The standardized tests are not just a resource for finding out a child’s baseline knowledge in a particular area but also a tool to determine funding and overall success of various schools. When students receive very poor scores on tests, the school is placed at fault and typically experiences a loss of funding (Hornberger, 2013). With less money and subsequently fewer resources, these schools continue to drop with respect to test scores, are deemed “failing schools,” and are eventually closed down completely (Hornberger, 2013). With so much revolving around the standardized tests public school students are now taking, much question should be brought as to what the students are actually being tested on. According to Hornberger (2013) and Au (2008), the tests do not represent a student’s ability to learn or their understanding of basic concepts but rather their knowledge of specific information they are able to recall on test day. Is this what we really want American education to be about?
Comments
4 responses to “Learning the content not the concept”
Hi Hannah!
In reading your last paragraph, I find myself coming to the same questions every time. If the tests don’t represent a student’s ability to learn, but rather their ability to recall specific test-related information (instead of understanding concepts), then what does this say that we value? It seems to lean towards quick memory techniques but not actual understanding. The difference between these two is that these quick fixes only last for a short period of time, so students don’t actually know the information. When asked to apply what they’ve learned to a novel situation, I predict that these students will struggle, because they’ve only been prepared for one setting: the test room.
I most definitely agree with you. Students are learning only for the current environment they need to perform in. As a new generation of test-taking students enters the workforce, I worry about how they are able to adapt to thinking on their feet and employing the concepts they were supposed to learn in elementary and high school to their job. So much emphasis has been placed on high test scores that young workers may not be able to truly apply what they have learned since up to this point, the primary goal has been to fill in the correct bubble.
Nicely written post! Sometimes it does seem that we have focused too narrowly on outcomes and neglected the process. Tests can be helpful in determining what students know but when that data is applied in punitive ways rather than as a tool for fostering growth we create a problem.
We will talk about Campbell’s Law at some point in the class:
“The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Very interesting to consider.
I think that the video we watched today about the PISA test kind of proved this point exactly. Even though the PISA is claiming to write questions that test problem-solving or ‘real world’ situations rather than memorized facts, the example questions they showed left me with doubts. The pizza question (where someone wants to know how many topping combinations there are at a pizzeria) wasn’t a particularly obscure or difficult question (though many students got it incorrect). However, it doesn’t seem to me that it is the kind of question that is really applicable in the ways they claim. Yes, I think that students should understand that type of math problem, but the way they’ve set it up seems irrelevant. People will order the pizza they want to eat, not stand in line doing math problems. Perhaps if we want to educate students for the ‘real world’ we could give math questions that actually come up in life (like comparing prices in a grocery store). Questions like the pizza example are the kind of problem that has students feeling like math isn’t a necessity in everyday life (which it is!).