Standardized testing is helpful in some ways but should not be used as a perfect singular strategy for student assessment. Brozo Simpson says "Assessment of literacy and content should use multiple data sources across multiple contexts" (88). This means that in order to properly facilitate assessment in a comprehensive manner, students should be assessed through multiple different strategies. Standardized testing is flawed and should only be used as a way formulating a hunch that a student may need more focus on a certain content area or literacy demand. Although I'm sure you are all aware of how Standardized testing can be inconsistent with one's literacy and academic capabilities.
For instance: How many of you become so stressed out from testing that it causes your performance to drop significantly? Do you feel like these tests adequately assessed your academic capabilities?
Since testing is only one form of drawing assessment, and many students have poor test taking skill; the data from these tests can be inaccurate or even tainted. This is why truly successful assessment needs to be achieved through multiple different strategies, and should be a long-term daily process of becoming informed about students' learning.
According to Simpson "Effective assessment requires planning, interpreting, and managing a variety of data" (89). This means that a teacher can collect as much data as they want but the data becomes useless if interpreted incorrectly or not at all.
One consistent concept throughout the readings has been embedding certain strategies into the lesson itself. This is one concept that I find most appealing. One's ability to accumulate and interpret assessment data at the same time as instruction appears to have the most direct and immediate strategies for proper assessment while also facilitating deeper literacy practices within the students.
One activity I found most interesting in this aspect was the word fluency activity. At the same time that the students are formulating scaffolding of the content, the teacher is also receiving very powerful and detailed data on the students prior understanding of the topic. This strategy then allows the teacher to determine which concepts need to be reinforced and can thus adapt the lesson accordingly.
Can you remember any strategies/activities from your past that ultimately facilitated content scaffolding while also revealed your prior knowledge of a concept?
Hi Kyle,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that multiple methods of assessment should be used to measure a student's comprehension. In a class I'm observing, a major assessment method is the questions students ask about the homework. Every night, the students have a single online homework problem. They either complete it and submit an answer or they submit a question about where they were getting held up. The next day, if 5 or fewer students had questions about the homework, the teacher goes to them individually during group work to help them. If more than 5 students had questions, the entire class goes through the problem together. I don't think this strategy is necessarily feasible for every school (my high school never had nightly homework and if we did, maybe half the class would have done it), but in the context I observed it really works to assess where everyone is at with the material.
Thank you for sharing. To answer your first few question, testing did not really assess what we were learning. In mathematics classes, teachers have the habit of merely teaching the types of questions that would appear on the exam. Theory was never being taught, so when it came to a type of question that we have not seen before, everyone would be lost. The idea to "embedding certain strategies into the lesson itself" is good because it allows new material to be taught, while previous material is being tested (occurring at the same time). I think it is easy to embed these strategies into math lessons since most of the content you learn will be used in the next lesson you teach. In any case, there should be multiple methods of assessing students.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post! I too think it is useful when there is formative assessment within the classroom that both helps the teacher know where to focus instruction and helps students learn important content/skills. One example that comes to mind is of a 7th-grade math teacher where I used to work. When going over problems as a class, she would ask a student for their solution and write what they seemed to be describing. She would stop at different points during the kid's explanation to ask why they used a certain operation or how they knew what to do next. She often asked for multiple responses for more difficult problems. It was done in a way that made students comfortable sharing their thoughts, and I think it was also a effective way to assess and address student understanding.
ReplyDeleteIn a educational system where we know standardized test will not be going anywhere for a while, I see how the scores of standardized tests may be shed some information about the learning progress of the students; but as you state “value of the data from that test should be taken with a large grain of salt considering it's flaws.”
ReplyDeleteI agree how you say that standardized testing should not be used as the singular method of assessment. Standardized testing quickly became the end all be all of assessment, with high stakes testing becoming increasingly important to schools from pre-school to college. I think that standard tests could potentially have their uses when implemented correctly, but other modes of assessment, when used correctly and planned well could be even more effective.
ReplyDeleteHi, Kyle. Thanks for your sharing. I agree with that standardized testing is helpful in some ways but should not be used as a perfect singular strategy for student assessment. From my point of view, a good way for students assessment should be based on students’ study level. Every students has different learn speed and different abilities to acknowledge. I don’t like standardized assessment like examination actually. But method of assessment for students should consider the current situations first.
ReplyDeleteI agree that standardized testing isn't a reliable way for assessing students' knowledge. I'm sure that most of the students in our class have dreadful memories of taking the tedious tests and the stress associated with them. Standardized tests are used more as a way to measure a school than it is to measure the students. Standardized testing also runs the risk of teaching to the test. Students don't learn as much as they should when this happens. There are many other ways to assess students' knowledge. Formative assessments work. Standardized tests don't reflect the capabilities of the students. Teachers should make their own assessments for students that better reflects this. And these assessments should be more disciplinary focused like Gillis and Van Wig (2015) suggested.
ReplyDeleteHey Kyle, I tend to agree with you that standardized testing can be more detrimental then beneficial. There are many students out there who fail miserably on a standardized test, who would be able to succeed if analyzed with the proper intentions and methods. Formative assessment, in my humble opinion, seems to be the best way about this. While this method is subject to the cooperating teacher's own perspective, formative assessment of a students ability would greatly indicate how they might be correctly summatively assessed. One of the other major problems with this is there is a dramatic increase in invested resources when formative assessment is more prevalent. While the students are of course worth the effort, the teachers have to be willing to sacrifice more time and energy to best assess the students in their classroom.
ReplyDeleteI think, in terms of being a mathematics teaching student, that multiple choice tests can be a very good job at being an all around assessment tool. There is always the need to have students show their work in math, and it is easy to use a multiple choice test to see the work of the student and see what needs to be changed and altered in order to more properly reflect the ability of the students. For math, I think standardized testing is the best way for reliable assessments to be made in an efficient manner. Students will be subject to adapting, proving their answers, having a pathway to the answer, all different ways of succeeding on the test and I believe that, if given enough time to complete it, that students would have a higher rate of success if given the multiple choice standardized test.
ReplyDeleteHello Kyle, thank you for sharing. While in theory standardized testing can be helpful in monitoring learning across the state, I don't necessary agree with them in practice. I just remember during my high school years teachers took time to actually teach us methods that would ensure we get better test scores. For example, they advised us to select a certain letter and if we were unsure about question select that letter choice. and keep it consistent. Some teachers taught us how to be successful for the test, and sometimes did not prioritize the actual content/ material.
ReplyDeleteAs a math discipline learner, I do think that math testing is a useful tool to evaluate how much we know and what we should work on. But I also agree that the test results could not accurately reflect students abilities. No matter what assessment methods that educators are using, the teaching goals haven't been changed -- to help students master knowledge.
ReplyDeleteHey, Kyle. Thank you for your sharing.
ReplyDeleteI am the one who will become so stressed out from testing and it causes my performance to drop significantly. I think we educators should give students some training in case of stress factors and they will perform well in any situation.
Hi Kyle, I agree with you that there are flaws to standardized testing. However, from what I have read on the subject, schools seem to be moving toward more standardized testing as opposed to less. Do you think it is possible to prepare students for these tests well trying to mediate against the disadvantages that certain students have with regard to standardized testing? I find it really sad that teacher performance is often based heavily on these tests results, as every student population is so different and some teachers have a much more difficult job preparing students for these tests than other students.
ReplyDelete-Erin
Thanks for your post!
ReplyDeleteI think Bell ringers in general are a good way to start scaffolding a day's topic. A good bell ringer gets students situated into a class and transitions them to the thinking of the discipline they are in. In terms of assessment, standardized testing can be effective, but I feel that teachers need to make sure that they don't teach everything to test, as it can be difficult to engage students by strictly going by the book...
As we have learned and read, there are many forms of assessment and I agree that formative assessments are extremely beneficial (for both the student and the teacher). The student can further understand what they need to work on and realize their own knowledge that they already have. This is particularly important in math, as often students don't have positive math identities. Wider forms of assessment allow students to see their growth and also shows them that there is more than one way to solve a math problem. It also reinforces to the students that they can always come in with knowledge. Validation is key in assessment.
ReplyDelete-Kiley
DeleteHi Kyle,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that standardized test is deleterious than helpful. I personally did not do well on standardized test because of the pressure and the anxiety that came with it. I feel like many of the student board focus all their resources on standardized exams and it is disheartening. I believe that formative assessment is a lot better than the standardized tests- I feel as if you are able to see their growth with formative assessment.
I apologize, this is Zahra Ali. I was using Linda's laptop to respond to your post.
DeleteI never liked standardized testing based on the fact that the formula for ideal summative assessment, trying to prepare a student for a student that would ideally check to see if that student can achieve a level of measurable understanding in the different areas of subjects that the test is covering. There was a time where I somewhat fell for the idea of standardized testing and part of that reasoning was believing that it was necessary, a big deal to look at. However, I agree with your point to talk about standardized testing and that formative assessment is a more comprehensive method compared to summarative assessment based on the fact there is more focus to detail over an extended amount of time compared to that one test you take in that one day out of the school year.
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