Lisa Rosenthal, GreatSchools Senior Editor, asks What’s so bad about teaching to the test?
If teaching content standards is considered “teaching to the test,” it may not be such a bad thing. … If the test measures the skills students are expected to be learning and teachers prepare students by teaching those skills, then teaching to the test is a good thing.
She explores the alignment of teaching, content standards, and testing without excusing or pointing fingers at those practicing outside of alignment.
This is an easy read for those outside the battle for and against teaching content standards and testing student progress as well as public accountability for spending Federal tax money to support non-aligned school time .
Rosenthal offers a reasonable brief about the debate. She leaves the door open for educators and parents to agree and disagree with her opinion.
Testing has made sense to me since I studied the origins and evolution of standardized academic and intellectual testing with T. Ernest Newland. He was taught by Maud Merrill, co-author of the Stanford Benet Intelligence Scale. I worked for Samuel A. Kirk in standardizing his Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. The SB is one of the parents of the ITPA and great, … grandparents of today’s content standards based testing.
I was a free-thinking anti-tester until I realized my opposition was based on misunderstandings and inappropriate uses of testing, not based on rational implementation of fact based assessment principles. I must have sounded like a political demagogue to those who knew testing literature before I did.
Teach content standards and then test student progress? Yes, as a minimum of what happens for each student in each classroom. How else can anyone, including a teacher, identify the extent to which each student has met minimum performance criteria for each lesson?
What do you think about testing student progress against state content standards?
I think testing has its place, but not as the only means of assessment. You can assess students using a portfolio measured against a set of criteria too. I think that standardized testing has had too much emphasis placed on it. I also agree that testing is not bad when used correctly. As teachers we are responsible for teaching state mandated content, and the state standardized tests’ content are legitimate source for determining what to teach. We just need to caution how much emphasis we place on the results since it’s one method of assessment, and it is a snap shot of the student at one moment in time, which may not necessarily be their best moment.
Thanks for sharing your thinking, Ryan. You make sense. Balancing testing and assessment has been an ongoing challenge for many of us. I think of testing students as a way of insuring that my instruction has addressed minimum criteria for what each student is expected to have learned. From what you’ve said, I’m guessing you likely think about it the same way.