BRATTLEBORO — In the world of education today, one of the biggest controversies is standardized testing. Does it accurately gauge how well a person is doing in school? Should teachers be held accountable for how well their students do on the tests? Is the cultural bias that has been found in standardized testing too large for some children to overcome?
Because I have gone to a private school, I have had the unusual experience of never having taken a standardized test - that is, until I took the SSATs, the Secondary School Admission Tests.
For people unfamiliar with the SSATs, they are much like the SATs.
In the SSATs, reading comprehension is a section with about seven or eight passages from fictional and non-fictional works, textbooks, and poems. After reading the passages, the test taker answers questions about the content, the intent of the author, and the deeper meanings behind the words.
I have always been taught to read between the lines. My classmates and I have also been taught that every answer is correct; no one interprets a book or a passage “the wrong way.”
So when I took a practice test, and did not do as well as I had expected on the reading comprehension section, my teachers told me that I was overthinking the test. I was baffled. How can you overthink a test that is meant to measure the quality of your education and to see how smart you are?
I took my first round of the SSATs and did pretty well, except for the reading comprehension portion. My teacher gave me these words of wisdom: “Don't think about the answers as your answer; think about them as the test makers' answer.”
The second time I took the test, I felt as though I were shutting part of my brain off.
I was not thinking from my perspective, but from that of the test makers. As a result, I earned substantially better scores.
In other words, I got better scores by thinking less.
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I spoke with two local public school teachers about their views on standardized testing – specifically, about their perspectives on the New England Common Assessment Program, or NECAP.
These teachers agreed that, while the tests are good in theory, they are not the only way to measure intelligence. Moreover, they both felt that test scores should not be used to punish schools or teachers.
They both said that the tests could be used to see how well a student has mastered a subject, but that they cannot - and are not made to - gauge a student's intelligence.
One used the example of a very smart student with dyslexia. Such a person could have trouble taking the test because he or she has difficulty reading, but that does not mean that the student is not learning in school or that he or she is unintelligent.
When I asked about teaching to the test, I received two very different responses.
“Do you ever find yourself straying from the subjects that you would like to teach because you need to enable your students to pass these tests?” I asked.
One teacher responded with a resounding yes. She said that she constantly has to teach her students test skills, and familiarize them with the tests, and that this takes time away from other, more important subjects.
The other teacher had a very different answer.
He said that if teachers are teaching effectively, they should not have to teach differently to enable kids to pass the test. If a reading teacher is teaching vocabulary and reading skills, he said, then students should be able to pass standardized tests without any extra help.
We then turned to the issue of cultural bias.
One teacher asserted that the test, in some cases, is more likely to tell you the size of the test taker's house, how much money his or her parents make, and how nurturing the home environment is.
He pointed me to the “30 Million Word Gap Study,” conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, which concluded that the difference in how many words two different children hear by the time they enter preschool - in extreme cases, a difference of 30 million words - is directly related to how well they will do in the reading and spoken language portions of their future educations.
The teacher noted that it is easier to study in a nurturing home, and that wealthy parents can pay for tutors to help their children pass the tests.
The NECAP test also measures the skills of a very diverse group of students from Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, in addition to almost 45,000 Vermont students. A high-functioning person with Down Syndrome could be taking the same test as a person with a very high IQ. This situation begs the question: Is there a fair way of grading such a huge group of people?
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When I asked an eighth-grade friend about the effectiveness of the tests, she agreed with the teachers, saying that the idea of standardized testing is good, but that the tests do not fully reflect what the student has learned.
Although she said that she has never had a teacher who she thought was teaching to the test, she also noted that not everyone cares what scores they get, or what scores their school as a whole gets, so students might not try their hardest.
A 2010 United States Department of Education report, Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains, sums up the problem: “More than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to variation in student level factors that are not in the control of the teacher.”
Specifically, these tests gauge whether someone has mastered a subject, but they do not take into account disabilities, cultural background, or wealth. They should therefore not be used to punish teachers, because teachers cannot always control how well their students do.
Are these tests really accurate enough to be used as a reason to fire a teacher, cut funding to a school, and undermine an educational process that can never be reflected in small, pencil-filled ovals?