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Standardized testing has been around for many years and has continued to be evident throughout the school system. Throughout the past few decades, many have realized the harm standardized testing displays and have created a conversation in ways to help monitor students' performance and knowledge throughout the year. "... it should be pointed out that standardized tests have frequently been used as a basis for segregating and sorting students," (Nieto & Bode pg 96).

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The practice of standardized testing is robbing students of self esteem and a good education

By

Photo by Kristin Millie Salazar | The State PressHaley Tenore | 02/10/2021 8:09pm
"Standardized testing puts more pressure on students and is not a reliable measure of intelligence, often having performance gaps between genders and race not reflected in class." Illustration published on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2021.

A majority of prospective college students today have had to take a standardized test, such as the SAT or ACT in order to get into college. It is seen as a rite of passage for a student in their junior year of high school to take one of these exams as away to measure their intelligence and determine their future.

With the pandemic, many universities have opted out of requiring prospective students to take these exams and submit their scores. At ASU, only Barrett, the Honors College required score submission, but now they have also put the requirement on hold. Submitting ACT and SAT is optional for admission to ASU. Honestly, I hope that it stays this way.

The use of standardized testing became commonplace in 2002 after President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated annual testing across the nation. After Bush enacted the policy, average test scores declined even further, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics analyzed by Brittanica. These exams have been blamed as part of the reason why the U.S.'s rankings in math, science and reading slipped drastically between 2000 and 2015.

Because of these exams, many teachers feel that they need to teach students how to take the SAT, rather than teaching them in a way that they learn best. Because of this, the curriculum is becoming more monotonous and less creative and engaging to students who do not learn in the way that the College Board requires them to learn.

Standardized testing is known to be discriminatory against students of certain backgrounds.

According to Bradley Bostick, a professor at the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher's College, some of the questions on these tests can include experiences that may not be familiar to students who are from low socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, in the 1980s, the SAT included a question where the correct answer included the word "regatta," a type of sailboat. Sailing is an activity associated with the upper class, and many may have never heard of the word, according to the LA Times.

Students who are from lower-class backgroundsdon'thave the same resources. They may not have wealthy parents who can send them to SAT prep courses or hire a private tutor for them. Some students cannot even afford to take the exam multiple times, while other students may have the funds.

They do not necessarily measure how intelligent a student is; they measure how well they can take a test.

The exam also does not care if a student has test-taking anxiety. Some students with mental health conditions or learning disabilities may still be highly intelligent. However, they may not be in the right headspace when taking this exam, especially if they were previously told that this exam was difficult or that they are not smart enough.

This exam can wreak havoc on a student's confidence. Students see their SAT or ACT score and feel that the number represents their self worth and their overall intelligence. For example, even though I did quite well in high school and graduated on the honor roll, I have test-taking anxiety and a disability, which did not translate well on my SAT and ACT scores. I was disappointed by my scores and even though I am now a successful college student, it still affects my self-esteem. While these exams do have accommodations for students with disabilities, lower-income students are less likely to have access to the accommodations.

The exam has also been known to hold biases against girls, which Bostick said is his "biggest problem."

He said that girls tend to score about 40% lower on the math portion of the exam. This gap does not align with how well female students fare in actual math courses, as they tend to get higher grades than male students in the classroom.

Reasons that female students tend to do worse on exams like the SAT include the fact that girls are often told that they are not as good at math. Girls also tend to be better course takers, while boys tend to be better test-takers. Girls are more likely to overanalyze aclosed-ended question and do better on open-ended questions, which the SAT does not provide.

Unsurprisingly, these exams also hold a racial bias. Much of this bias is tied to classism. Even though they are participating in these exams more, Black and Latinx students are still seeing a gap between their scores and the scores of their white counterparts. Additionally, the scores do not reflect the decreasing performance gap between Black and white high school students. As mentioned earlier, the questions are written with a white, middle-class student in mind, so students who do not have the same experiences will do worse.

Standardized testing grew out of IQ tests, which were developed and implemented by eugenicists to validate the superiority of the "Nordic" race. They work *exactly* as intended, i.e. as pseudoscientific gatekeeping devices to facilitate racism. https://t.co/Jh4GiazReL
- Dr. Sam Dundon (@serdundon) June 27, 2020

Are GPAs more likely to predict a student's college performance than standardized testing scores? Some high performing countries, such as Finland, don't use standardized testing at all.

"It's less to do with this momentary snapshot in time of how you're doing on this one Saturday," Bostick said. "It's a poor way to assess someone's ability to go to college and be successful."

Without standardized testing being a requirement this year, it has become clear that these tests are unneeded for college admission. They are archaic and prejudiced, and it is time that we retire them.
Editor's note: The opinions presented in this column are the author's and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
Reach the columnist at htenore@asu.edu or follow @haleyyhmt on Twitter.

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Opinion: Schools need to drop standardized testing

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Standardized testing has been proven to be inequitable, so why are universities across the country still requiring them?

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Standardized Tests and Educational Quality

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Standardized Tests and Educational Quality

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W. James Popham speaks about how standardized testing may not always measure educational quality. He highlights ways in which standardized testing can hinder students' ability to test well, and what an educator can do to help their students.

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Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality

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Educators are experiencing almost relentless pressure to show their effectiveness. Unfortunately, the chief indicator by which most communities judge a school staff’s success is student performance on

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This article highlights how standardized testing actually hinders students' abilities and the multiple ways a students' ability is not fully being shown.

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No phenomenon poses a greater threat to educational equity, and ultimately, to the quality of education in this country, than does the differential performance of minority and majority students on standardized achievement tests. In the wake of increasing public concern that schools are somehow not as rigorous as they used to be, standardized tests have been hailed as the "get tough" medicine we need to restore traditional standards of excellence in our classrooms.

As the use of such tests has dramatically increased over the past several years, so has the power which tests wield over the educational lives of students. In every state, standardized achievement tests are now routinely used to determine access to education from first grade through graduate school. What has occurred in our schools is, to use FairTest's terms, nothing less than a "testing explosion."
Testing Explosion
There is little question that this "testing explosion" has the power to effectively destroy whatever small measure of educational equity has been achieved in our schools over the past two decades. What is perhaps less obvious is the realization that standardized tests pose a profound threat not only to equity in our schools, but the quality of our children's educational experience as well - a threat so great, in fact, that standardized testing should be abolished altogether.

The most outspoken and zealous advocates of testing in this country - representatives of the Educational Testing Service - argue that standardized achievement tests do not create inequities within the educational system. They merely reflect the inequities that already exist there. Minority students tend to perform less well on standardized tests because the quality of education they receive is often inferior to that of majority students. Consequently, they lack the requisite skills and knowledge to perform well on tests. From this perspective tests are not the problem; schools are. This view is well represented in a recent statement made by Donald Stewart, current president of thy College Board: "If the gap between minority and majority test scores is ever to be closed, improvements in the elementary and secondary education of minority students must be accelerated."

It is this view which largely fuels the current "testing explosion." Undergirding it are two widely accepted, but wholly erroneous assumptions about standardized achievement tests. One is that they are, in fact, a valid measure of excellence i.e., they assess conceptual understandings which are essential to learning and ultimately important to the betterment of society.

The second is that standardized tests can be used as a mechanism for improving education, especially for poor and minority students.
No Real Connection to Excellence
The truth of the matter is that far from measuring excellence, standardized achievement tests tend to focus primarily on mechanical, lower-order skills and to reward students' rapid recognition of factual information. Thus while the president of the College Board glibly asserts that the way to improve minority performance on standardized tests is to improve the quality of their educational experience, teachers are left to confront the reality that what will prepare students to perform well on tests is often in direct conflict with, or simply extraneous to, their real educational needs. In their position statement on standardized testing of young children, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) lays out this conflict in clear, unequivocal terms:
" ...current research on reading instruction stresses a whole language/literacy approach thal integrates oral language, writing, reading, and spelling in a meaningful context, emphasizing comprehension. However, standardized tests of reading achievement still define reading exclusively as phonics and word recognition and measure isolated skill acquisition. Similarly, current theory of mathematics instruction stresses the child's construction of number concepts through firsthand experiences, while achievement tests continue to define mathematics as knowledge of numerals. (Young Children, March, 1988, p.42)
Resolving this conflict in the classroom forces good teachers to sustain a tenuous balance between providing instruction that truly fosters students' conceptual understanding of a subject and drilling them on the kind of isolated skill exercises that earn points on standardized tests. The point here is not that students don't sometimes need to work on isolated skills, especially when they're first learning how to read and write. But work on isolated skills is only a means to a larger end - applying those skills in a meaningful context. Removed from context as they are on standardized tests, such skills are meaningless. Held up as a measure of achievement, they become mistaken for the end, for what is most important, instead of what is only ancillary and ultimately trivial.

The truth of the matter is that there is little, if any, real connection between quality instruction and standardized and standardized test performance. Consider, for-example, the most successful of high school English classes, one in which students learned to write thoughtful, original essays about topics they genuinely cared about, in language that was clear and specific and drew in powerful ways upon students' most profound personal and cultural experience. Assume also that the teacher taught students to carefully edit their work so that grammatical errors in their papers were occasional and minor.

What about that highly successful class would prepare students to "correctly" conclude on the American College Testing Program (ACT) that "pioneered" is preferred to "started up by;" "reach my destination" to "get there;" and "prove to be" to "come out to be?" What important conceptual understandings, what effective writing skills, would students from this class draw upon to decide on the ACT whether the underlined portion of "my thoughts were irresistibly sucked toward the moment when..." should remain or be replaced by pulled helplessly, uncontrollably drawn, or propelled mercilessly? (examples taken from Hoover, 1981).

One could well argue that a student who preferred "started up by" to "pioneered" or "get there" to "reach my destination" might in actuality be a more effective and sophisticated user of language than the student who chose the "correct" answers precisely because she chose the clearest, most easily understandable vocabulary in which to communicate ideas. The point, of course, is that the choice between "get there" and "reach my destination" is a stylistic one, dependent upon what one is trying to communicate and to whom. Removed from a real communicative context, the choice is a meaningless and arbitrary one. It tells us nothing about a student's level of language competence.

Or consider the following example from a standardized reading achievement test where the child is asked to determine the "right answer" in the following selection:
Father said: Once there was a land where boys and girls never grew up. They were always growing. What was Father telling? The truth _____ A lie _____ A story _____
As Hoover, Politzer and Taylor point out, any of these could be "right" answer. "Metaphorically, it could be the 'truth' if the growth were mental and not physical. It could be a 'lie' in that the word 'lie' in blackspeech can also mean a joke or a story, and it could also be a 'a story'" (Hoover, Politzer, and Taylor, 1987, p. 91)

Distinctions such as these are not arbiters of excellence. Nor do they provide us with valid information about a student's ability to apply knowledge in a real context. A child's performance on the word recognition portion of a standardized test doesn't really tell us whether or not she can derive meaning from the books she reads in class or engage in discussion about them with her classmates, or apply the understandings she's gained through her reading to a writing assignment or to her own life. A student who is asked to construct a well organized essay in 30 minutes on the Pre-Professional Skills Test in order to qualify for admission into a school of education might be an excellent writer and still perform poorly on this task because she thinks more deeply about issues than many other people and thus cannot as easily or quickly reduce her ideas to the highly simplistic, formulaic response necessary to produce a half-hour essay.

Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg makes the point that a major fallacy of standardized testing is the notion that "smart is fast" "Jumping into problems without adequate reflection," says Sternberg, "is likely to lead to false starts and erroneous conclusions. Yet timed tests of ten force a person to solve problems impulsively" ( New York Times, no date).
Failure to Measure Important Abilities
Not only do standardized tests fail to provide an adequate measure of what they purport to assess - verbal and mathematical skills - they also ignore the much broader range of skills and abilities that enable one to function most effectively in a complex, pluralistic society - e.g., the ability to work collectively, to adjust to change, to function effectively in a variety of social and cultural contexts, to understand the perspectives of others, to persevere, to motivate, to solve problems in a real-life context, spatial abilities, kinetic abilities, bilingual and bi-dialectal abilities, analytical abilities, leadership abilities, oral and aural language abilities, social interaction skills, moral integrity, a sense of social commitment. As Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner points out, "there are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many different abilities that will help you get there."

It is an ironic, and for society, ultimately tragic coincidence that at the very time when advances in developmental psychology urge us to consider a broader and more complex conception of intelligence and ability, and of the multiplicity of talents and competences required to function effectively in the world, we have come to define excellence in our schools within the narrow parameters of what can be measured on standardized tests. When one considers the broad range of abilities necessary to do good work in the world next to the meager portion of these we've carved out to call excellence, it may well be as Joseph Renzulli has suggested, that when we use standardized tests to determine who has access to educational opportunity - to the accelerated class, the "best" high school, the college classroom - we may actually end up discriminating against the students with the greatest potential to make a contribution to society.
Destruction of Diversity
Perhaps no where is this discrimination better illustrated than in the devestating effect which standardized tests have had, and continue to have, on the number of minority students entering the field of education. In a 1986 study, University of Florida professor G. Pritchy Smith projected that the combined effect of the National Teacher Examination (required for initial teacher certification in at least 40 states) and the Pre-Professional Skills Test (required for admission to teacher training programs in a growing number of states, including Wisconsin) would nearly decimate the ranks of minority students entering the teaching profession in the next few years. The absence of minority teachers can only be expected to exacerbate the problems which many minority children experience in school. Minority teachers not only provide the role models which research and experience identify as crucial to academic achievement for minority students. They also bring understandings and perspectives to education which their white colleagues simply do not have access to. It is difficult to imagine how we will be able to improve the educational experience of students from diverse cultural communities without access to the perspectives of teachers who come from those communities.

In a recent article in the Harvard Educational Review, Lisa Delpit gives voice to the growing sense of alienation which many minority educators feel from current educational debates about what constitutes effective instruction for minority students. She quotes a black principal discussing her experiences as a doctoral student at a well known West Coast university in which white professors and students talk authoritively about issues concerning the education of black children:
If you try to suggest that that's not quite the way it is, they get defensive, then you get defensive, then they'll start reciting research. I try to give them my experiences, to explain. They just look and nod. The more I try to explain, they just look and nod Then when it's time for class to be over, the professor tells me to come to his office to talk more. So I go. He asks for more examples of what I'm talking about, and he looks and nods while I give them. Then he says that that's just my experiences. It doesn't really apply to most Black people. just keep looking and nodding. They don't really hear me.
It becomes futile because they think they know everything about everybody. What you have to say about your life, your children doesn't mean anything. They don't really want to hear what you have to say. They wear blinders and earplugs. They only want to go on research they've read that other white people have written.

Delpit maintains that what lies at the heart of the alienation many minority educators feel from white dominated discussions of minority educational issues is fundamentally a question of power: "whose voice gets to be heard in the determination of what is best for poor children and children of color." She argues that meeting the needs of poor and minority students in our schools requires authentic cross-cultural dialogue in which minority educators and scholars function as full and equal participants in the discussion. Corroborating Delpit's perspectives is a small but growing body of research whose findings suggest that cultural factors, and in particular, the use of instructional methods which are congruent with students' cultural background, play a significant role in the educational success of minority students.

As with advances in our thinking about the nature of intelligence and ability, the voices and experiences of minority teachers and scholars compel us toward a richer, more complex definition of what constitutes excellence, one that accounts for a greater variety of strengths and abilities and that encompasses a broader range of cultural perspectives. This is a conception of excellence that is deeply rooted in diversity.
Decline in Quality Education
Standardized achievement tests, and the simplistic notion of excellence they embody, sound the death knell of diversity in our schools. They silence a cross-cultural dialogue that has barely begun, not only in the field of education, but in every area of academic, professional and political life. We live in a society which is becoming increasingly racially and culturally diverse. It is naive and ultimately suicidal to assume that we can solve the problems which confront such a society without access to both the perspective and the diverse range of skills and abilities represented in a multicultural population. We simply cannot afford a definition of excellence so narrow that it excludes access to the very resources we need to survive.

Unarguably, Donald Stewart is correct in his assertion that minority students are often ill-served in our educational system. But given the fact that standardized tests bear little, if any, relationship to substantive learning, it makes no sense to assume that truly substantive improvements in the educational experience of minority students would necessarily have any effect whatsoever on their test performance. What is clear at this point is that in many schools something very like the opposite has occurred. As teachers have come under increasing pressure to raise students' test scores, the quality of education these students receive has been significantly reduced. In too many classrooms, test content has come to dictate curriculum.

In some cases, abilities and skills not measured on achievement tests have simply been removed from the curriculum all together. According to FairTest, Gerald Bracy, former Director of Research, Evaluation and Testing in the Virginia Department of Education, found, for example, that some teachers in the system didn't bother teaching students how to add and subtract fractions because the state's minimum competency tests only included items on multiplication and division of fractions. Similarly, Deborah Meier, a public school principal in Manhattan, reports that when the New York City test for word meaning eliminated items on synonyms and antonyms, these were also eliminated from the curriculum.

In some states, matching curriculum with the content of standardization achievement tests has become a system-wide mandate. FairTest reports that school systems in at least 13 states are attempting to "align" their curriculum (with standardized tests) so that students do not spend hours studying materials upon which they will never be tested, regardless of the value or benefits which could be derived from that effort. Pressure on teachers and administrators to standardize curriculum in order to raise test scores can be intense. Weiss (1987) reports, for instance, that in 1985, the superintendent of schools in St. Louis decided to fire 60 teachers and principals because their students\failed to improve their scores sufficiently on standardized multiple choice tests.
Bias and Decline in Equal Opportunity
The fact is that far from serving as a vehicle for educational reform, testing has had a negative effect on the quality of education in this country. Clearly, standardized tests neither measure excellence nor foster it in our schools. What they do, instead, is to provide a seemingly objective basis upon which to allocate educational resources. In the midst of discussion about equity in testing, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the purpose of standardized testing is, after all, to make discriminations, to grant access to educational opportunities to some students while at the same time denying it to others. To that end, test items are deliberately selected so as to maximize differences between high and low scorers. The design and purpose of standardized tests thus insure that only some people will do well while others will necessarily perform poorly.

In this sense, it doesn't really matter whether or not standardized tests actually measure excellence, so long as society is satisfied that educational resources are being allocated to those who most "deserve" them. There can be little doubt that if a large percentage of white middle class students performed poorly on standardized tests, these test results would be viewed as invalid and their use in making education decisions termed discriminatory. The differential performance of minority students on standardized tests, however, occasions no such concern, not even in the face of an extensive body of research on cultural bias in testing which has been collected over the past twenty years. Most of this research has focused on various forms of linguistic bias in testing. Essentially, researchers in this area make the same points today that they did twenty years ago. The tests have multiplied, test items have been revised and updated, but the bias remains unchanged.

According to a study by Hutchinson, for instance, fully a third of the items in typical reading achievement tests are dialect prejudiced. For example, they require minority students to make distinctions between words, removed from context, which are often homonyms (sound alike) in their everyday oral speech patterns, such as had/hat and right/rat for black dialect speakers or this/these and tag/tack for Spanish dominant speakers (Examples taken from, Hoover, Politzer and Taylor, 1987). Despite the considerable body of research which indicates that phonological distinctions like these do not necessarily have any effect on reading comprehension when the words appear in meaningful context, such distinctions are used on standardized tests to help measure minority children's level of reading achievement.

Items which require test takers to recognize or add inflectional endings, which are dialect distinctions for many minority students, appear frequently on the language usage portion of standardized tests. The following example was taken from the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) (the student is asked to identify any errors):

Afrikaans is the language (A) of the ruling party in South Africa and (B) of Afrikaners (C) whose vote (D) maintain the status quo. (E) No error (taken from Weiss, 1987)

Whether or not deliberate bias was the intent here, it would be hard to imagine a speakers manipulate a second dialect under normal conditions, they are likely to revert to features of their first dialect when under unusual stress. Thus the person most likely to get this item wrong would be a bidialectal Black student experiencing the dual stress of taking a test crucial to her future while at the same time being forced to attend to grammar in a sentence about apartheid in South Africa.

Even when dialect items are not embedded within such provocative and racially insensitive content, they still place bidialectal and bilingual speakers at a major disadvantage compared to native standard English speakers, who do not have to waste cognitive energy monitoring interference between two language systems. Even if the stated intent of dialect-prejudiced items were to determine whether or not minority test-takers had mastered standard English conventions (which it is not), such items would not provide us with any valid information about how these students actually used language in a real-life context as opposed to the highly stressful conditions involved in a testing situation.

Distinctions which involve dialect or language differences are not just trivial, as with most standardized test items, but highly discriminatory as well. Such items don't just discriminate against individual minority students however. They discriminate against excellence. They turn what is an asset in a multicultural society - the ability to speak more than one dialect or language and thus communicate across a variety of social and cultural contexts - into a deficit, on the very tests which supposedly measure who is likely to make a meaningful contribution to society and thus deserves access to our best educational resources.
If a person does something against the law, he is an:
Another area of potential linguistic bias which has been extensively examined by researchers is the use of questions which assume cultural values and/or experiences which may not be shared by members of minority communities. On the vocabulary subtest of a standardized reading achievement test, for example, students are directed to choose the best synonym for inequality from among the following items: absence, foreign, difference, similarity, poor. Hoover, Politzer, and Taylor comment "of the responses, all except 'absence' and 'similarity' could be 'correct' in cultures in which students are aware that difference, poverty, and foreignness are associated with inequality" (Hoover, Politzer, and Taylor, 1987). For children whose experience, or whose family's experience, with the police or other officials has been a negative one, similar ambiguity exists as to which is the one "correct" answer in the following item, also taken from a standardized reading achievement test:

Similarly Weiss (1987) found that questions which appear on recent forms of the Scholastic Aptitude Test necessitated familiarity with such class-tied pursuits as polo, golfing, tennis, minuets, pirouettes, property taxes, melodeons, and horseback riding. Again even leaving.aside the issue of cultural bias, what does knowledge of these activities have to do with scholastic aptitude?

Although there have been few studies done on the subject, there is some research which indicates that minority children do much better on test items whose content relates to familiar cultural experience.

A.P. Schmidt (1986) found, for example, that on a reading comprehension passage about life-style changes in Mexican American families, Mexican American students scored significantly higher than they did on reading comprehension passages whose content was less related to their lives. Similarly, Darlene Williams (1979) found that the I.Q. scores of Black students were raised when test items included pictures of Black people and of events related to Black culture.

Doubtless, many people would strongly object to the proposal that standardized tests be revised so as to include a sizable body of content specifically related to minority cultural experiences on the grounds that this would place middle class white students at a disadvantage. After all, why should they be expected to know anything about minority experience?
RUNNER: MARATHON
Yet aren't minority students placed at an even greater disadvantage when standardized tests reflect little or nothing about their cultural experience, while for middle class white students almost everything on the test is familiar cultural terrain? There is one common ground on tests, to be sure. But middle class white students have to smuggle far less often than minority students to make meaning out of test items which take for granted experiences they've never had and which have absolutely nothing to do with ability. Is i ability or cultural experience that is being measured, for example, on the following item from the Scholastic Aptitude Test:

In this example, it is marathons and regattas which a student must be familiar with to prove her fitness for college. At the other end of the educational ladder, it's piano lessons, airplane trips, zoo excursions, musical recitals, museums, daddies who read story books, farm animals, historical sites and friendly policemen.

The advantages which middle class white students have on standardized tests extend beyond the linguistic features and the content of test items, however. There is good reason to believe that the test taking situation itself is experienced very differently by majority and minority students. Test taking is a skill which middle class students are very good at because they receive extensive practice in answering "test questions" from the time they first learn to speak. Numerous studies of language socialization in white middle class communities indicate that the largest percentage of questions addressed to preschoolers by mothers and other primary

Caregivers consist of simply structured questions to which the questioner already has the answer - e.g., "how many eyes do you have?"; "what color is this dolly'.s dress?"; "how many fingers is mommy holding up?" The purpose of such questions is not for the questioner to gain information, but for the child to display information, for which she is typically rewarded with extensive non-verbal and verbal praise. Shirley Brice Heath notes that middle class caregivers are quite conscious of using such questions not only to teach children communicative behaviors that they will need to use in school in order to display competence in the classroom and on tests, but also to direct children's attention to what it is they should learn.

When reading stories to preschool children, middle class parents often intersperse their reading with questions which focus the child's attention on noting and recalling specific details of the text (e.g., " now, how many balls is the little boy holding?" "What is the bird doing?") Perhaps the most important "lesson" which preschoolers learn as a result of such interactions is how one is expected to com- municate about, and respond to, text.
Advantages of the Culture of Power
In a highly detailed study of their daughter Rachel's preschool language development, Scollon and Scollon (1981) amassed a large body of data which indicates that by the age of two, Rachel already knew that reading was a participatory literacy event in which one person assumed the role of "exhibitor and question er" while the other assumed the role of "spectator and respondent" Even though she could not yet literally "read," Rachel could "pretend read," changing her intonation patterns to imitate reading prosody. And when playing the role of respondent to questions about what she had "read," she understood the rules governing proper display of knowledge in school and on tests: i.e., "(the 'respondent') should not provide a full knowledge of the text, but rather give responses to specific questions about the text addressed to her by the exhibitor/questioner." These are, of course, the same rules which govern display of knowledge on a standardized test.

The point here is that white middle class children enter school well rehearsed for performing well on standardized tests. Not only have they received considerable practice and experienced a great deal of prior success in answering test questions. They also tend to share in common a number of taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of communication which serve them well in a testing situation:

1. Adults and children have a communicative relationship in which the adult is the "spectator" and the child is the "exhibitionist." Thus it is perfectly appropriate, and indeed, expected, that a child will exhibit her abilities, or "show off' for an adult.

2. Adults often ask children questions to which they already know the answer. Both the adult and the child understand that the purpose of such questions is for the child to demonstrate or "prove" that she knows the answer, rather than for the adult to gain new information or to seek the child's point of view on a topic.

3. Text (written material which the child reads or listens to) is an appropriate context for being" asked test-type questions. Thus the child learns to direct her attention to those aspects of text which "fit with" her expectations about test questions - i.e., such questions tend to focus on highly specific aspects of the text, rather than on more global, thematic features; they deal with one aspect of the text at a time, they often reward the child's ability and/or willingness to state, or demonstrate awareness of, what is obvious.

4. One is valued (i.e., viewed as competent and knowledgeable) for one's ability to display information; to do this better than someone else is a mark of distinction and achievement.

Research indicates that many working class and minority children come to school with very different values and assumptions about what constitutes meaningful communication. While numerous language studies indicate that the "test question is the type most frequently addressed to middle class preschoolers, Heath (1983) found that in the working class Black community where she spent 11 years studying language socialization, children were almost never asked questions to which the adult or older child already knew the answer. According to Heath's data, the most prevalent type of question addressed to preschoolers in this community was the "analogy question," calling for an open-ended response drawn from the child's experience (e.g., "what do you think you are?" to a child crawling under the furniture). Other frequently asked questions were "story' starters" (e.g., "did you see Maggie's dog yesterday?") and accusations (e.g., "what's that all over your face?") Children were also asked questions to which only they knew the answer (e.g., "What do you want?j, but very seldom test type questions, the assumption obviously being, why would you ask someone something you already know the answer to?

Not only were questions addressed to preschoolers in this community much more open-ended and elicitive of children's unique perspectives and creative elaborations on a topic than were questions asked of pre-schoolers in middle class communities, reading was also an activity

perceived of much differently in this community. Reading tended to be a social event, in which listeners, young and old, were free to throw in comments or to elaborate on some connection to their personal experience, rather than a context for testing children's comprehension or teaching them appropriate school behaviors. People in this community were admired for their ability to tell a good story, draw insightful analogies, or present an interesting and unique point of view, rather than for their ability to display information or show off knowledge for its own sake.

Research in other communities corroborates Heath' findings. Many working class and minority children grow up in language communities where little value is placed upon asking children to display information for its own sake and where "stating the obvious," "saying what everyone knows" is a communicative behavior which is not encouraged because it is perceived as having no meaningful communicative purposes. Thus for many working-class and minority students, the testing situation is not only an unfamiliar one, but one which violates some of their most deeply held assumptions and values about the nature and purpose of communication.

Communicative style - including such features as how one interprets the meaning of another utterance, what aspects of a message "need to be attended to, how one frames questions and structures answers, notions about what is worth talking about - is learned very early in life and is deeply tied to one's personal and cultural identity. To suggest that members of minority communities change the way in which they interact with their children so that they will be better prepared to take tests in school is really to ask that they surrender a significant portion of their cultural identity. And to what end? Of what use is facility in answering test questions except to answer test questions? Everything about standardized testing - its assumptions of middle class experience, its emphasis on information removed from any meaningful context, its focus on individual achievement and competitiveness, the narrow range of abilities which it measures - is deeply at variance with the values and strengths of many minority communities. Those who argue that it is possible to make standardized tests less discriminatory by removing their cultural bias seriously underestimate the enormity of their task. What is a "culture fair" test in a multicultural society? And who is it that could design such a test? The truth is that any knowledge worth having is inextricably linked to culture and to context and thus isn't reducible to measurement on a standardized test.
References
In the final analysis, the most fundamental question to be answered about standardized testing is not why minority students tend to perform less well than majority students, or even what can be done about it, but, rather, what is wrong with a society which allocates its educational resources on the basis of tests which not only fail to measure excellence, but which discriminate against the vast majority of its minority population?

Delpit, Lisa (1988). "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy." The Harvard Education Review, Vol. 58, No. 3.

Heath, Shirley Brice, (1983). Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cam. bridge University Press.

Hoover, Mary R., Politzer, Robert L., & Taylor, Orlando (1987). "Bias in Reading Tests for Black Language Speakers: A Sociolinguistic Perspective." The Negro Educational Review, Volume 38, Nos. 2.3_

Hoover, Mary R. (1981). "Bias in Composition Tests with Suggestions for a Culturally Appropr!ate Assessment Technique." In M. F. Whiteman (Ed.), Writing: The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written Communication Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Scollon, Ron & Scollon, Suz.a:nne, B.K. (1981). Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication. Roy 0. Freedle (Ed.) Norwoord, NJ: Ablex Publishing.

Williams, Darlene (1979). "Black English and the Stanford-Binet of Intelligence," Stanford, CA: Stanford University School of Education,Ph.D. Thesis, 1979.

Schmidt, A. P. (1986). "Unexpected Differential Item Performance of Hispanic Examinees on the SAT-Verbal, Forms 3FSAOS and 3GSAOS," Unpublished statistical report of the Educational Testing. Service.

Smith, G. Pritchy, (1986). "Unresolved Issues and New Developments in Teacher Competency Testing." Urban Educator, Fall, 1986.

Weiss, John G. (1987). "It's Time to Examine the Examiners." The Negro Educational Review, Volume 38, Nos. 2-3.

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The Case Against Standardized Achievement Tests

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No phenomenon poses a greater threat to educational equity, and ultimately, to the quality of education in this country, than does the differential performance of minority and majority students on [...]

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Standardized Testing and What is Not Being Measured

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Standardized Testing and What is Not Being Measured

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Nikki Adeli, a high school student, talks about what standardized tests do not measure and the effects standardized testing has.

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What standardized tests don't measure | Nikki Adeli | TEDxPhiladelphia

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Dr. John Poulsen and Kurtis Hewson write about whether or not standardized testing is fair or not. This article gives educators and parents a clear understanding of the pros and cons of standardized testing. They also go into the further effects of standardized testing, such as emotional and environmental factors.

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Abstract

Standardized testing in some circles is demonized as the vilest form of assessment. These individuals point to many problems with how these tests are created and administered, as well how the results are used. In other circles standardized testing represents true assessment whereby individual performances can be compared to other performances in a meaningful manner. That is, standardized testing is seen by some as a fair form of comparison; others do not. Knowing where standardized testing came from and what were the motivations for its growth, may help in understanding and perhaps in being able to use the results of standardized tests to improve teaching and learning. This article serves as an overview of the history and current realities of standardized testing.

Introduction

Considering the role standardized testing has acquired in education systems internationally, one can safely assume that a vast majority of Canadians have experienced these tests as students. More and more students' lives are becoming influenced by standardized testing, as a societal push for educational accountability has led to a dramatic increase in the use of these assessments across districts and nations (Guskey & Jung, 2013). Their value is much debated by educators, academics, and politicians, but what is clear is that their use seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. Experiencing standardized tests as students can provide a useful perspective, however, it is important that faculty and students have a general understanding of the history of standardized or high-stakes testing, as well as a basic overview of the how these assessments are built.

This article will explore the history of standardized testing, recent developments within standardized testing, creation of test questions, and applicability.

Definition

Stiggins (2008) states that

these once-a-year tests are not likely to be of much value to classroom teachers as you plan and carry out day-to-day instruction. They are assessments OF learning that are too infrequent, broad in focus, and slow in returning results to inform the ongoing array of daily decisions. But this does not mean that these tests are without purpose or value. They can communicate valuable information about students' achievement status to other decision makers (pp. 347-348).

This relatively rational statement could be considered a definition of the battle lines that have been drawn up between those who are proponents of standardized tests and those against them.

The intent in standardized testing is to have large numbers of students write a single test, then to compare any single score against all others to see how an individual's score compares to the large sample. The results are then posted on a bell curve that indicates where a score sits within descriptive statistical standards. Standardized tests are given to large groups numbering at least in the thousands, sometimes millions. In order to make the results as valid as possible, thus "standardizing" the administration of the assessment, the tests are:

written at the same time and same day for all students,

administered with consistent instructions,

allowed the same amount of time for each student to write the test, and

scored in the same manner.

Scantron is a common method of marking bubble sheets of multiple-choice style questions. Essays are marked by specialists who have been trained to mark in similar fashion.

Burke (1999) maintains that traditionally "standardized" meant that the test is standard or the same in three ways: (a) format/questions, (b) instructions, and (c) time allotment. Format/questions means that the test questions are the same for all students writing the exam. The information that the students are to show they know is asked of them in the same format that is usually multiple choice. Multiple choice is the format of choice because as Stiggins (2008) suggests, "It is relatively easy to develop, administer, and score in large numbers" (p. 354). Further, in order for the test to be fair in the sense of all students having the same chance to answer each question correctly, all questions must be the same.

The instructions are to be the same as well. These are to be delivered in the same way to all students so that no students are advantaged or disadvantaged. The last standardization is time allotment. All students are to be given the same amount of time to finish the exam.

However, the standardization of standardized exams is being eroded. Common changes to standardized testing allow certain students to have more than the allotted amount of time. Some students with certain learning needs are now allowed to have more time than other students to complete the exam. These students are then often allowed to write in different rooms as well.

The second requirement of standardized tests is also frequently adapted. Students with reading problems can get "readers" to read the questions. The rationale behind this is that the curriculum asks that students know certain information. Whether the students know this information is the purpose of the exam, not whether the students can read. These readers may adapt the standardized instructions that the students receive. Also, reading the questions to the students may give them an advantage or disadvantage other students do not have. Therefore, the second and third requirements of standardized testing are no longer strongly in effect.

There are other forms of standardized testing that are available other than multiple-choice questions, for example, essay writing. This form of testing currently has the disadvantage of needing markers to assess the essays. Essay markers must be trained to gain a sense of what the standards are. Then they must engage in the time-consuming activity of reading the essays. Even with the training assessors can give significantly different grades to an essay.

Proponents of standardized testing point to large-scale use of the tests that go beyond the individual student or even the school. Standardized testing allows comparison between provincial education systems or even national education systems. Advocates say that standardized tests are impartial and rational. They state that standardized tests are an inexpensive way to check that schools and teachers are accountable, that students and therefore the public are getting the education that public dollars are paying for. Standardized tests by this measure are intended to examine the whole education system and therefore individual scores may be not as significant.

"... the standardization of standardized exams is being eroded."

History

The history of standardized testing is underpinned by noble sentiments. Testing can be found in all cultures. Evaluating the understanding of someone learning a new skill is common for all societies. Standardized testing as we know it today began in earnest in China as a form of aptitude testing, trying to ascertain who would be best at a particular job. Fletcher (2009) states that, "The earliest record of standardized testing comes from China, where hopefuls for government jobs had to fill out examinations testing their knowledge of Confucian philosophy and poetry." These exams started in about 100 CE but were firmly established during the Sui Dynasty in 605 CE. They attempted to predict aptitude by discerning the best candidates for the Chinese civil service.

The most recent impetus to standardized testing was the Industrial Revolution and the movement to increased schooling where students were moved out of the work force and into schools. One of the easiest and arguably the cheapest way to test large numbers of those children was with a standardized exam.

Alfred Binet (1857-1911) and Theodore Simon (1872-1961) developed what is now commonly known as an IQ Test, beginning in the late 1800s and culminating with the Binet-Simon scale in 1905. These intelligence tests were created in response to the French government wanting to develop special education classes for students who were not benefiting from the newly instituted regular compulsory education program. The tests tried to identify students who needed focused education in order to maximize their education. These standardized tests were an attempt to streamline education so that society would gain maximum benefit from each citizen, a noble sentiment.

The test contained problems arranged in order of difficulty in a range of subjects but had as the basis items assessing comprehension, reasoning, and judgment (Reynolds, Livingston, & Willson, 2009). Louis Terman (1877-1956), who was teaching at the time at Stanford University, noted the success of these exams and their potential applicability in America. He spearheaded the creation of the Stanford-Binet Test which remains, in its fifth iteration, the most popular IQ testing vehicle in existence.

Fletcher (2009) suggests that "... by World War I, standardized testing was standard practice: aptitude quizzes called Army Mental Tests were conducted to assign U.S. servicemen jobs during the war effort." Robert Yerkes was one of the academics assigned to test the servicemen and then suggest appropriate placement. This testing of servicemen helped build up a record of statistical evidence for IQ testing. Carl Brigham worked with Yerkes in the testing of servicemen. After the war he published a book, A Study of American Intelligence, based on the results in World War I. From this finding and analysis he created the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in 1926. Its intention was to screen college applicants to insure the worthy candidates were allowed admission. The test became immediately popular and by 1945 it became a standard method of college and university entrance, again a noble enterprise.

Everett Linquist invented the American College Test (ACT) in 1959 as a competitor to the SAT. In 2011, more than 3.3 million individuals wrote SAT and ACT exams. The ACT is considered more of a test of accumulated knowledge while the SAT is thought to test logic. Other important standardized exams are the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT).

These standardized tests that attempt to predict success or aptitude seem to be successful. Reynolds, Livingston, and Willson (2009) state, "As a general rule, research has shown with considerable consistency that contemporary intelligence tests are good predictors of academic success" (p. 334). Fishman and Pasanella (1960) reviewed SAT predictive validity in the 1950s, finding that the median correlation between student first-year success and the SAT score was a significant 0.61. Recently Kobrin, Patterson, Shaw, Mattern, and Barbuti (2008) found a correlation of 0.29, a respectable correlation between SAT scores and First Year Grade Point Average (FYGPA).

In Alberta, standardized testing began in the 1960s. McEwen (1995) suggests that Alberta's introduction of achievement testing for Grades 3, 6, and 9 was done in response to a worldwide wave of educational reform that wanted more accountability in education. At the Grade 12 level, diploma exams were reinstated in 1984 after being removed for a few years. McEwen clarifies the reason for the achievement tests:

Public education is funded by taxpayers who want and have a right to know if they are getting value for their investment. Such accountability requires public information. An indicator system is a tool to focus reform and to improve accountability by providing better information about the education system's performance. The goals, or intended benefits, of implementing indicator systems are to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the educational enterprise, to improve education, and to provide a mechanism for accountability (p. 28).

Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

The primary conundrums in standardized testing of achievement lie in the validity and applicability of the test results. Validity relates to how accurately the test results actually reflect the students' knowledge about the subject. Standardized tests use a minimum number of questions and getting even one or two wrong due to environmental reasons will affect the individual student's results. The factors that affect a student getting a question right or wrong may be infinite and could be organized into (a) situational/environmental confounding factors, (b) personal/emotional factors, and (c) grade-spread requirement in standardized testing.

Situational/Environmental Factors

Even though standardized testing attempts to minimize confounding variables by requiring students to write in similar situations, it may be that some students are writing in situations that are significantly different from other students, for example, it might be too bright or too dark or even too cold or too hot. The testing conditions may cause students to perform poorly such as when students might miss questions not because they do not know the material but for something as simple as the testing centre had poor lighting that caused headaches in students, or because the testing room was too cold and did not allow certain students to focus.

Personal/Emotional Factors

Students who are poor test takers because of nerves associated with tests may not be able to show what they can accomplish in the high-stakes atmosphere of standardized testing. Their anxiety becomes the determining factor of how well they do the test, not whether they know the material. Even students who are normally good test takers can have a skewed result; for example, a student who had an emotional moment just before the test might not be able to focus and receives a result that is not reflective of his or her capabilities.

Grade-Spread Requirement

Perhaps the primary concern with achievement standardized testing is that testing should be based on curricular outcomes that are mandated by the provincial or state governing bodies. Standardized tests have to make a one-size-fits-all test that will not fit all because as Popham (1999) says, "... standardized achievement tests will invariably contain a number of items that are not aligned with what's emphasized in a particular setting" (p. 331). A 1983 study of alignment between textbook content and the standardized test found that, "In no case was even 50 percent of a test's content satisfactorily addressed in any textbook" (Popham, p. 331). That is, there was a poor correlation between what was in the test and in the textbooks that were a prime resource to prepare students for the test.

Test creators seek a score spread in their questions. They seek questions that are not answered correctly by too many students. Questions that are answered correctly by more than 60% of the students are usually removed from the test. Popham indicates this is a problem because "... items on which students perform well often cover the content that, because of its importance, teachers stress" (p. 332). So the important material that is required by the curriculum is often not tested.

How questions are determined to be most worthy for standardized testing is important. When deciding which questions to use, test creators, in essence, try to find questions that only the top 50% of the students will get right. These types of questions are popular in standardized testing because they support the common theory of testing whereby the highest achieving students answer the questions correctly. So, standardized tests can be self-affirming. Students who are in the top 50% of the class answered the questions correctly because they are in the top 50% of the class.

Further, if a concept is taught to all students in a class and all students answer the question correctly, that question will not be used in the future as it does not spread the students' scores so that fine-grained norm-referenced numbers can be associated with each student. That is, if all students did well on the test then there would be no bell curve and the associate connection with where each student sits on the curve. Put more simply, there have to be questions that are only answered by about 50% of the students in order for comparisons to be made.

A student's socio-economic status is highly correlated to standardized achievement test scores. This is probably due to the tests being skewed to reflect learning that children gain at home. Again there is a curriculum and testing mismatch. For example, if a question asks about a "field of work" such as law or medicine, students whose parents are in such professions may understand the concept from conversations at home. However, students whose parents work in the service industry or work at the local grocery store may not. Answering the question correctly may not be a function of what was learned at school but rather what has been learned out of school. Antagonists to standardized achievement testing suggest that it is not fair to check on student achievement that is not in the curriculum.

What instructors or textbooks focus on may not be reflected in the test. The requirement for a score spread in the exams means that questions that are answered by a majority of students will probably be removed because they do not discriminate enough.

Conclusion

The history of standardized testing suggests that the impetus for large-scale testing has been based on noble aspirations, primarily that of having the right person in the right place, whether that place is the correct job in the military or the correct form of education. Standardized testing has value in today's society. Aptitude testing for admission into colleges and universities seems to be especially effective as quantitative research has established links between such testing and later success at post-secondary institutions.

Achievement testing has issues especially related to situational/environmental factors, personal/emotional factors, and grade-spread requirement that may make applicability difficult to ascertain. That is, standardized testing may be best at determining aptitude or future ability in an individual and also good at examining a school district's efficaciousness. Standardized tests seem to be weaker at being able to correctly indicate how much a specific student has learned.
>> Back to Table of Contents
References

Alberta Assessment Consortium (2012). A new look at public assurance: Imagining the possibilities for Alberta students. Retrieved from http://www.aac.ab.ca/a-new-look-at-public-assurance-imagining-the-possibilities-for-alberta-students.html

Alberta Education (1997). Teaching Quality Standard applicable to the provision of basic education in Alberta. (Ministerial order #016/97). Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/media/6734948/teaching%20quality%20standard%20-%20english.pdf

Bew, Lord P. (2011). Independent review of key stage 2 testing, assessment and accountability, final report, as written for the Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-00068-2011

Boardman, A. G., & Woodruff, A. L. (2004). Teacher change and "high stakes" assessment: What happens to professional development. Teaching & Teacher Education, 20(6), 545-557.

Booi, L., & Couture, J. C. (2011). Testing, testing. What Alberta can learn from Finland about standardization and the role of the teacher. Alberta Views, 7, 28-32.

Brookhart, S. M. (2001). The "Standards" and classroom assessment research. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, Dallas, TX. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED451189).

Burke, K. (1999). The mindful school: How to assess authentic learning (3rd ed.). Arlington Heights, IL: Skylight Publishing.

Fishman, J. A., & Pasanella, A. K. (1960). College admission selection studies. Review of Educational Research, 30(4), 298-310.

Fletcher, D. (2009, December 11). Standardized testing. Time. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1947019,00.html

Franklin, C. A., & Snow-Gerono, J. L. (2007). Perceptions of teaching in an environment of standardized testing: Voices from the field. The Researcher, 21(1), 2-21.

Gordon, S. P., & Reese, M. (1997). High-stakes testing: Worth the price? Journal of School Leadership, 7, 345-368.

Gronlund, N., & Waugh, C. (2009). Assessment of student achievement (9th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Guskey, T. R., & Jung, L. A. (2013). Answers to essential questions about standards, assessments, grading, & reporting. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Kobrin, J., Patterson, B., Shaw, E., Mattern, K., & Barbuti, S. (2008). Validity of SAT for predicting first year college grade point average (Report No. 2008-5). New York, NY: College Board. Retrieved from http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Validity_of_the_SAT_for_Predicting_First_Year_College_Grade_Point_Average.pdf

McEwen, N. (1995). Accountability in education in Canada. Canadian Journal of Education, 20, 1-17.

Pedulla, J. P. (2003). State-mandated testing - What do teachers think? Educational Leadership, 61(3), 42-46.

Popham, J. (2002). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (3rd ed.) Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Popham, W. J. (1999). Why standardized tests don't measure educational quality. Educational Leadership, 56(6), 8-15.

Reynolds, C., Livingston, R., & Willson, V. (2009). Measurement and assessment in education (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Stiggins, R. J. (1999). Are you assessment literate? The High School Journal, 6(5), 20-23.

Stiggins, R. J. (2008). An introduction to student-involved assessment for learning (5th ed.). Columbus, OH: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall.
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Standardized testing in some circles is demonized as the vilest form of assessment. These individuals point to many problems with how these tests are created and administered, as well how the results are used. In other circles standardized testing represents true assessment whereby individual performances can be compared to other performances in a meaningful manner.

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Standardized testing and its problems, and its alternatives

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Standardized testing and its problems, and its alternatives

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This article talks about the issues with the current standardized testing systems and the effects standardized testing has on both students and teachers. This article also gives alternatives to standardized testing.

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Standardized testing has been used in the U.S. since the early 1900s. With the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the use increased as the law stated that all students must be tested in reading and math from grades 3-8 and in high school. These tests have fueled an ongoing debate and requires a closer look on how standardized testing is used and whether or not they are useful for determining academic achievement.

According to The Glossary of Education Reform, standardized tests are any form of examinations that are taken and scored in a standard manner. Most questions are in a multiple choice or true/false format, allowing for quick and simple scoring. They can also be used for a variety of purposes and are not limtied to academic settings. However, they are commonly used to measure academic aptitude and achievement.

Standardized tests come with a variety of opinions. However, test experts and educators continue to utilize them as they are unbiased, compatible with easy scoring, a source of evaluation for improvement and comparison, and an incentive for both teachers and students' achievement. Despite these benefits, standardized testing is still a subjective matter, and many question if they are fair to students and educators.

Effects on Students:

A strong argument is that standardized tests fail to measure student performance; in reality, they determine which students are good test-takers. Several factors contribute to how well a student performs on a test, including stress, test anxiety, or even an empty stomach. The tests only show who prepared and scored well on that particular exam. In addition, low scores do not necessarily indicate lack of knowledge, and similarly high scores do not indicate an abundance of knowledge.

Knowing that standardized tests are not completely accurate and may merely be a representation of memorization or multiple-choice skills, students are tied to these scores. Their academic career can heavily rely on standardized tests because schools and universities pay attention to numbers. These high stakes can only add to the stress and affect student performance. Fortunately, many schools are becoming test-optional, but this does not mean that standardized tests are no longer important.

Effects on Teachers:

Standardized testing can be extremely important, and for educators, it may feel like their job and evaluations solely rely on their students' performance. This creates more stress as teachers feel they have to teach to the test, rather than teach for the pure purpose of learning. They may also feel intense pressure from administration as high test scores can be better for the school as a whole.

Alternative Options:

With a few of these disadvantages in mind, there are alternatives for standardized testing that have been pulled together by experts!

1. Sampling: administering standardized tests to a random sample of students, instead of all students every year

2. Stealth Assessments: another way to collect reading and math scores; digital programs that students complete throughout the year in order to show progress over time

3. Multiple Measures: collecting other data in order to track student progress, rather than relying on one standardized test

1. social and emotional skills survey

2. game-based assessments

3. performance/portfolio-based assessments

4. Inspections: different approaches to assessments including projects, reports, presentations, etc.

I think these alternatives are great solutions and states should look into utilizing these and reducing standardized tests. The results from the 2018 Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) show that the U.S. ranked 36th out of the 79 countries that participate in the exam. An education expert states that the nation's results have always been mediocre and the below average math score has not showed change since 2000. So, how effective is standardized testing really? Since the country has shown no significant progress.

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Standardized testing has been used in the U.S. since the early 1900s. With the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the use increased as the law stated that all students must be tested in reading and math from grades 3-8 and in high school.