Posts Tagged ‘Standardized Testing’

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Standardized Tests for Teachers!

August 2, 2012

After what I put my students through last term, I’m sure they would love to see me sit for some exams. They would be more than happy to preside over the testing and ensure I don’t try to cheat from the teacher sitting next to me:

The Indonesian Government’s been forced to defend its attempt to test the country’s one-million teachers, after the first run was plagued with problems and allegations of corruption.

In an attempt to improve education, Indonesia has begun testing the performance of teachers, instead of students.

This week it launched the first online exam to assess the abilities of those who are educating the country’s children.

One million teachers will be tested in 3,500 locations across 33 provinces.

But the head of the Education Ministry admits that on the first day, only 10 per cent of the teachers who attempted were able to log on and sit the test.

Click on the link to read Oops, We Seem to Have Lost Your Exams

Click on the link to read I’m Just Gonna Say It: Standardised Tests Suck!

Click on the link to read Too Many Tests, Not Enough Teaching

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Pushy Parents and those Awful Standardised Tests!

May 13, 2012

So it turns out that some parents are so keen to have their children perform at the NAPLAN tests (Australia’s standardised tests) that they have started preparing them as early as kindergarten age. I couldn’t think of anything more dispiriting for a child. It’s bad enough I have to teach my Grade 3’s based on the questions they are bound to encounter during the tests, what could be worse than being subjected to it, up to 5 years in advance?

PUSHY parents are training kindergarten kids for Naplan – four years before they have to sit the controversial literacy and numeracy tests.

About a million students – in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 – will sit this year’s tests over three days next week.

But the pressure to perform is beginning years early, with some parents forcing their four-year-olds to take grade 3-level tests at home.

Dr Les Michel, from the Senior Students Resource Centre, said pre-school parents had joined the soaring demand for practice Naplan tests.

“This year we’ve even been getting kinder parents,” Dr Michel said.

“We would have had dozens, I’d say.”

Dr Michel said kindergarten parents bought the grade 3-level booklets, costing up to $24.95 each.

“They are really pushing their kids,” he said.

School Education Minister Peter Garrett said Naplan practice for pre-schoolers was “highly alarming”.

“It’s putting more pressure on kids at such a young age that they really don’t need, and it’s usurping the role that teachers in the classroom play, which is completely unnecessary,” he said.

However schools are also increasing the pressure, with “teaching for the test” now beginning as early as grade 1.

“We’re aware of it happening, even though people won’t admit it on the record, and why would they?” Parents Victoria executive officer Gail McHardy said.

“It demonstrates the desperation of some schools – their reputation hangs on it.”

Victorian Independent Education Union secretary Deb James said there was an “increased and unwelcome” focus on the tests in schools.

Australian Education Union state president Mary Bluett said: “Kids sitting down and practising tests is not the way to learn.”

Lucky for these pushy parents, I have some suggested exercises for them to set for their children.

 

To prepare them for the persuasive writing exam, you could set your child some of the following topics:

1. What is more fun, studying language conventions or playing outside with friends?

2. Is doing practice tests with mum and dad considered quality time?

3. Is learning for fun overrated?

 

To prepare them for the maths paper, I have the following suggested activities:

1. Count up the blisters that you have accrued from all the writing you’ve done and round the number to the nearest ten.

2. If Johnny went to school from 8:00 a.m until 4:00 p.m. and then spent the next 2 hours completing timed reading comprehension exams, how much time does he have to relax?

3. What percentage of pushy parents ends up rearing appreciative kids?

Good luck parents!

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Posted in Child Development, Naplan, Parenting, Standardised Testing | 1 Comment »

Too Many Tests, Not Enough Teaching

March 30, 2012

The rise of standardised testing has replaced authentic teaching and learning with a saturation of practise and formal testing:

SATURATION testing is seriously undermining the quality of primary school education and should be stopped immediately, parents and educators claimed yesterday.

Thousands of kids are subjected to trial exams every week in the lead up to the compulsory Naplan tests, as well as exams for opportunity classes or selective high schools, and coaching by private tutors.

But while Naplan, which forms the basis of performance ratings on the My School website, focuses on literacy and numeracy, experts claim they are being “taught to the test” at the expense of other areas such as arts, physical education and music.

With the barrage of testing beginning in kindergarten, education consultant and public schools principals’ forum official Brian Chudleigh said the system was “out of control” and skewing education in the wrong direction. A former senior principal who is the education expert for The Daily Telegraph’s People’s Plan, Mr Chudleigh said the testing regime was contributing to a “massive dysfunction” in the state’s education system.

“We have become a system that is manic about measurement – the main problem is that it is so convenient for the politicians,” he said. “They want to reduce things to the value of a percentile or a number, and that has an impact on education.

“If a kid can’t be measured they don’t want to know about it.

“It reduces the value of anything that you can’t measure and the curriculum becomes focused on the measurable stuff,” Mr Chudleigh said.

“So the development of the whole child – including socialisation, emotional welfare, physical fitness and cultural factors – are relegated in importance.

“Many schools are having two or three lessons every week practising Naplan-style tests and that takes valuable teaching time away from other subjects. A lot of the best stuff we do with kids, particularly in primary school, is not measurable.

“It’s out of control. But our universities are littered with these kids who don’t do as well there as the generally all-round educated students.”

Federation of Parents and Citizens’ Associations spokeswoman Rachael Sowden said being taught to the test was “not what parents want”.

“They do not want to know that their child scored three marks more than the kid down the street,” she said. “Parents are as concerned about the whole child and how they are going in creative arts, physical education and music as much as in literacy and numeracy.

“Parents do want to know where their child is up to at school and they do that best by having a conversation with the teacher.”

I hate having to prepare 8 year-olds who have never sat for a formal test before for the rigours of the 3 day marathon that is NAPLAN. It’s just not fair! They are too young!

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Posted in Naplan, Standardised Testing | 3 Comments »

I’m Just Gonna Say It: Standardised Tests Suck!

March 4, 2012

I completely and utterly detest standardised testing. My Grade 3 students are just 8 years old. How unbelievable insensitive of our Federal Government to subject these kids to a week-long torturous array of formal testing!  These kids have had little to no experience with test papers and exam conditions, and no matter how calm and stress free I am trying to make my classroom, my students know that it’s coming and they don’t like it one bit!

HIGH STAKE standardised tests, such as NAPLAN, are having a negative impact on children with experts saying such examinations reduce the ability to learn.

Nationwide testing of students in years 3, 5, 7, and 9 was introduced by the federal government four years ago to allow parents and teachers to benchmark the numeracy and literacy levels of individual children and specific schools.

But a review of academic literature on the issue released by the University of Western Sydney’s Whitlam Institute revealed national testing programs such as NAPLAN were a source of significant stress for young people and their families.

Institute director Eric Sidotti said schools can become ”emotional cauldrons”.”It should come as no surprise that the introduction of a national regime of standardised external testing would become a lightning rod of claim and counter-claim and a battleground for competing educational philosophies,” he said.

The review found ”a range of concerns” about the reliability of standardised testing, quality of learning experiences, structure of the curriculum and health and well-being of children.

There is also evidence of negative effects on service delivery; professional-parent relationships; and stress, anxiety, pressure and fear experienced by students.

Research also found a negative impact on teaching, with standardised tests putting pressure on teachers to emphasise results over holistic learning.

”Teachers will focus on the areas in which students will be tested, while reducing the proportion of class time devoted to curriculum areas not included in state tests,” the review notes.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said tests measuring the progress of more than a million Australian students over the past four years allowed parents to identify schools where students achieve comparative improvement over peers of a similar background.

Ms Gillard said NAPLAN lifted the academic performance of students, giving teachers feedback on education strategies and providing disadvantaged schools with access to extra funding.

”We want every child in Australia to have access to a world class education,” she said.

”My School is pivotal to this. It helps us see what works and which schools need support to improve.”

There is nothing positive to come out of these tests. It negatively affects the way my students view learning, it affects the way I teach and it prevents what should be a fun year from eventuating. If you want to test high school kids, go ahead. But leave my Grade 3’s out of your mean experiment!

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Posted in Naplan, Standardised Testing | 2 Comments »

Preparing Students for the Real World

December 2, 2011

Sometimes I find it hard to decide whether to expose my students to the realities of the real world or protect them from disappointment.

Never is the conundrum stronger than when it comes to the issue of competition in the classroom.

Society loves to paint clear labels. Winners and losers, successful and unsuccessful, popular and unpopular, beautiful and ugly. The pressures that these labels bring is certainly prevalent in the classroom and is a great cause of anxiety among the students. No matter how tactful the teacher can be, the students are aware that they are graded, levelled and streamed, and with the help of their parents, take a strong interest as to where they stand in the pecking order.

There are many teachers who use competition as a motivating force. Everything from star charts and games to public assessments and evaluations are intended to get students to ignore the often mind numblingly boring lesson presentation and instead, concentrate on beating their fellow classmates.

There are students that excel when offered this incentive. These students love the modern trend of standardised testing.  For them, it’s an opportunity to show how dominant they are over their peers.

But then there’s the student that collapses in a heap under the threatening and potentially confidence sapping pressures of being compared to others. These students watch their fellow classmates reading at level 30 while they are in the late teens and decide that they hate reading and have no interest in practicing or improving.  These students claim that they are stupid, so what is the point.

I was a student who struggled to cope in an environment of “dog eat dog” competition.  My classmates left me in my wake as I struggled with the labels that came with constant comparison and the humiliation of being repeatedly streamed in the bottom group. That is why I modify my teaching to cater for students sick of the constant intrusion of grades in education.

When testing the kids, I don’t give them a letter or number grade, instead I chose to give them clear feedback on skills they performed well in and found challenging.  This not only prevents students from comparing themselves to others, but also provides clear feedback on what they can do and what skills require further practise.

The question is, if real world experiences feature competition, comparisons, labels and winners and losers, am I protecting my students from experiences they need to learn? Eventually they will need to compete against others for jobs and promotions. If I protect them from real life situations am I not doing them a disservice?

Another issue I have on this topic is that I don’t approve of many of the behaviours prevalent in the “real world”.  Just because there is bullying, gossiping, bad manners and selfishness outside my classroom doesn’t mean that I will stand for it in my classroom. At some point I want to ignore what goes on outside the four walls of my classroom and instead, help my students change the rules of society rather than simply prepare them for it.

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Posted in Competition in the Classroom | 2 Comments »

Do You Remember When Learning Wasn’t About the Test?

November 14, 2011

Students across Australia, and dare I say it worldwide, are sick of constantly being graded.  Gone are the days when a child can learn to love a given subject through observation, experience, discussion and self-evaluation.  Now every learning focus leads to the ultimate test of nerve – a test.

Standardised tests have absolutely ruined the enjoyment of learning.  They reinforce a pecking order which is not beneficial for children.  The constant grading of children make kids who try hard but struggle to perform, feel dumb and useless.  It has taken over classrooms, with teachers too worried about the implications of their class doing badly to teach the curriculum the way it was designed to be taught.  Instead, they are forced to teach to the tests.  This involves months of practice exams.  How inspiring!

Our children deserve better.  They deserve to go to school without having to constantly sit for preparation tests followed by real tests followed by another set of preparation tests etc.  They deserve to have their education untainted by political point scorers.

I love the backflip contained in the first paragraph of a recent editorial in the L.A. Times:

The high-stakes measurement of student progress through annual standardized tests has, in many classrooms, restricted creativity, innovation and individuality. It has emphasized the skills involved in taking multiple-choice tests over those of researching, analyzing, experimenting and writing, the tools that students are more likely to need to be great thinkers, excellent university students and valued employees. But, by pressuring schools to raise achievement, it also has ensured that more students reach high school able to read books more sophisticated than those by Dr. Seuss — which, sad to say, was a major problem a decade ago — and tackle algebra by ninth grade.

Once you have taken the “creativity, innovation and individuality” out of education there is no “but”.  There is no good way of rationalising those vital missing ingredients.

Sure it’s good to have data on the quality of teaching and learning in our classrooms.  Of course, assessments are a staple of education.  But these dry, monotonous, pressure-ridden tests can get too much for kids looking for more enjoyable ways of learning.

If these tests have as I suspect, a negative effect on our students’ enjoyment of learning and self-esteem, is it really worth persevering with?

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Posted in Standardised Testing | 6 Comments »

Meeting Targets Over True Academic Progress

July 22, 2011

Well done Monty Neill!  The Executive director of FairTest, reaffirms what I have been saying all along about teachers caught cheating on standardised tests.  Below was my reaction last week to the Atlanta School teaching scandal:

There is no excuse for teachers or officials to cheat.  We are there to provide a moral example for our students, and cheating of any kind is clearly unacceptable.

But we must not leave the matter at that point.  There’s a reason why some teachers have cheated on standardised tests.  Those tests  are anti-education.  They measure success through pressurised outcomes rather than authentic teaching and learning.  They expose teachers to unfair stress and scrutiny and force them the teach to the test, rather than teach to enrich and engage.

Mr. Neill says it even more succinctly:

Focusing solely on punishing the Atlanta school employees who wrongly changed test answers ignores more fundamental problems.

The Georgia investigators found that a primary cause of cheating was “unreasonable” score targets coupled with “unreasonable pressure on teachers and principals.” They concluded that “meeting ‘targets’ by whatever means necessary became more important than true academic progress.”

Misusing standardized exams as the primary factor to make educational decisions encourages score manipulation. Campbell’s Law predicted this result decades ago. It states, “The more any quantitative social 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.”

That is precisely what happened in Atlanta. The nation’s students, schools and taxpayers deserve assessment systems that promote ethical behavior, better teaching and stronger learning outcomes.

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Posted in Professional Conduct, Standardised Testing, Teachers Stress | 1 Comment »

Another Day, Another Standardised Test

July 5, 2011

UK teachers are told to add mandatory phonics tests to the ever-expanding list.  Remember when teaching was about engaging the students not test practise?

This time next year, every year 1 pupil in England is likely to encounter a new national test assessing a central aspect of their ability to read.

The children, aged five and six, will be presented with 40 individual words on paper, and asked to sound them out to their teachers or to another adult. Some words will be familiar to most, while others will be made-up or “non” words such as “mip” or “glimp”, designed only to assess the child’s ability to follow the pronunciation rules, such as they exist, of written English.

The results of this test, or “screening check”, will then be collected, given to the child’s parents and also used to produce statistics on national and local performance and to inform Ofsted inspection judgments on schools.

One leading literacy figure has described the new test as potentially “disastrous”, while another told this newspaper it was an “abomination” and likely to be a major waste of taxpayers’ money. A petition with more than 1,000 signatures against it has been collected.

The debate surrounds the principle of teaching phonics, another boring, routine and old-fashioned way of teaching content that could be conveyed in a far more exciting and engaging way.

Beyond this debate, I feel there is another issue at stake.  The rise of obsessive testing inevitably leads to the curriculum being hijacked by test practise as well as pressure needlessly put on Primary aged students.  These students deserve to have their crucial first years of schooling without the stresses they will confront later on down the track.

 

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Posted in Literacy, Phonics, Standardised Testing | Leave a Comment »

National Testing Leads to Bad Teaching

May 10, 2011

Today school students all around Australia are going to be sitting the dreaded NAPLAN tests – a National test covering language, literacy and numeracy.  A test many children don’t take all that seriously, leaving their teachers to explain disappointing results and unmet expectations.  The students will often sit for the test without ever finding out how they went afterwards.  Why should they?  For all they know, this test is nothing more than a hurdle requirement that seems to stress the teacher out far more than themselves.

And that’s where these tests fail.  The pressure placed on the teacher forces them to teach to the test.  Weeks out from the NAPLAN date, teachers forgo their best laid plans, and instead force their students to undergo countless practice tests and mindboggingly boring skills sessions.  The students don’t know what hit them!  All of a sudden, they are bombarded with these tedious, non-interactive lessons, where the teacher often loses his/her temper in a state of panic and utter desperation.

“Guys, if you don’t listen, you wont know what to do come NAPLAN time.”

This argument is futile.  They know that if they don’t understand how to answer a question, all they have to do is leave it out, or better yet, guess.  No need to lose sleep over it!

For teachers, these tests are becoming even more important, now that test results are connected with teacher bonuses:

TEACHERS are continuing to “teach to” national literacy and numeracy tests, despite warnings from education authorities.

The first of three days of NAPLAN testing begins for year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students across the country today.

But educators warned the pressure being put on schools to perform well was having unintended consequences.

And the weight placed on NAPLAN results will increase today when the Government links them to financial bonuses for the country’s best teachers.

Today’s Budget is expected to commit $425 million to provide bonuses of up to $8100 to the top 10 per cent of teachers.

Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Frank Sal said that some schools were already under pressure to post high NAPLAN scores, even before they were linked to teacher bonuses.

While many schools have been doing practice exams to prepare for this week’s tests, parents have been told they can do nothing to boost their children’s performance.

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority chair Prof Barry McGaw said regular learning was the best preparation for students: “NAPLAN is not a test students can prepare for, because it is not a test of content.”

Gone are the days where good teaching meant innovative and engaging lessons.  Gone are the days when teachers were valued for new, fresh approaches to developing skills and nurturing the collective sel-esteem of the class.  No, nowadays teaching is about meticulously preparing for a test that comes every 2 years in a student’s life and ultimately doesn’t truly capture what they know and what they are truly capable of.

These lessons can be monotonous, lack opportunities for critical discussion and go against the grain of authentic teaching, but as long as you persist, there may be a bonus in it for you.

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Posted in Naplan | 5 Comments »

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