This one goes out to those on both the Left & Right - and anyone in between - who falls for the ridiculous notion that there is something wrong with "standardized testing."
Absent testing, we would have no idea how well or poorly educated our kids were. This is one of the reasons that BIG ED hates testing - standardized or otherwise. Testing exposes them for the failure that they are. Unfortunately, it (testing) has been co-opted enough to protect BIG ED as well.
Like most issues that are debated in education, the complexities that develop out of the complete lack of accountability and over spending of funds tend to create a great deal of ambiguity.
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Let's start with the obvious.
Despite many parents' belief in the discredited "progressivist" ideology of BIG ED, they still wish their children to be educated. Hence their support of measurement (otherwise known as testing). Try as they might, BIG ED can't kill the support for testing, so they discredit it (through "Ed School" research and other politically suspect organizations) as best they can.
So, testing occupies a political limbo - parent's want it, but are trained to hate it. This creates the opportunity for BIG ED to do what BIG ED must to maintain its grasp on public dollars - they must kill the messenger.
Rather than produce an exceptionally long post on this very important topic, I invite you to click this link---> Why Testing Experts Hate Testing.
Here is the same thing in PDF.
This is a loooooong document. But when you are done with it, you should be cured of any nonsense regarding the "evils" of testing. Below is a brief example of some of the the best tidbits. They focus on the particular piece of silliness revolving around "lower order" & "higher order" thinking skills.
The mediocre people we send through 'ed school' are indoctrinated with the insipid notion that you can develop "higher order thinking skills" with out the foundation of knowledge & content - what these mediocrities call "mere facts" or "lower order thinking skills."
To suggest that you can develop HOTS with out LOTS (now there's a serendipitous set of acronyms for you) is to suggest that you can have "imagination" with out "knowledge." Maybe you can, but what good is it?
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Testing Critique in RED
Testing emphasizes "lower order thinking skills."
Lorrie Shepard has also asserted:
High-stakes testing misdirects instruction even for the basic skills. Under pressure, classroom instruction is increasingly dominated by tasks that resemble tests....Even in the early grades, students practice finding mistakes rather than do real writing, and they learn to guess by eliminating wrong answers...
Response in Blue
Critics like Smith and Shepard say that intensive instruction in basic skills denies the slow students instruction in the "the neat stuff" in favor of "lower-order thinking."81 They argue that time for preparing students for high-stakes tests reduces "ordinary instruction." They cannot abide the notion that preparing students for a standardized test could be considered instruction, because it is not the kind of instruction that they favor.82
Instruction to which teachers may resort to help students improve their scores on standardized tests tends not to be constructivist. It is the type of instruction, however, that teachers feel works best for knowledge and skill acquisition. Teachers in high-stakes testing situations do not deliberately use instructional practices that impede learning: they use those that they find to be most successful.
These testing critics idealize the concept of teachers as individual craftspersons, responding to the unique needs of their unique pupils in unique ways with "creative and innovative" curriculum and instruction.83 But the most difficult jobs in the world are those that must be created anew every day without any consistent structure, and performed in isolation without collaboration or advice. In Public Agenda's research, "teachers routinely complained that teaching is an isolated and isolating experience."84
By contrast, teachers in other countries are commonly held to more narrowly prescribed curricula and teaching methods. Furthermore, because their curricula and instructional methods are standardized, they can more easily and productively work together and learn from each other. They seem not to suffer from a loss of "creativity and innovation"; indeed, when adjusted for a country's wealth, teachers in other nations are commonly paid more, and usually have greater prestige.85
Critics like Shepard and Smith cannot accept that some teachers may want to conform to systemwide standards for curriculum, instruction, and testing. Standardization brings the security, convenience, camaraderie, and common professional development that accompany a shared work experience.
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Critique con't:
Testing Emphasize on Lower-Order Thinking
One CSTEEP (an anti-testing interest group) study, funded by the National Science Foundation, analyzed whether several widely used commercial (and mostly multiple-choice) tests required "higher-" or "lower-order" thinking. A press account boasted, "In the most comprehensive study of its kind yet conducted, researchers from Boston College have found evidence to confirm the widespread view that standardized and textbook tests emphasize low-level thinking and knowledge and that they exert a profound, mostly negative effect on classroom interaction."
Response:
Many readers would be astonished, as I still am, by the vehemence of some critics' ire toward something as seemingly dull and innocuous as item response format. Yet many of the accusations leveled at multiple-choice items have little substance. For example, you can often find in CSTEEP and FairTest publications assertions that multiple-choice items demand only factual recall and "lower-order" thinking, while "performance-based" test do neither. Both claims are without merit. It is the structure of the question, not the response format, that determines the character of the cognitive processing necessary to reach a correct answer.
Test items can be banal and simplistic or intricately complex and, either way, their response format can be multiple-choice or open-ended. There is no necessary correlation between the difficulty of a problem and its response format. Even huge, integrative tasks that require fifty minutes to classify, assemble, organize, calculate, and analyze can, in the end, present the test-taker with a multiple-choice response format. Just because the answer to the question is among those provided, it is not necessarily easy or obvious how to get from the question to the answer.
Anyone who still thinks that multiple-choice items demand only factual recall should take a trip to the bookstore and look at some SAT or ACT help books.
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Bruno again:
This goes on for pages, but you get the idea. This study thoroughly debunks the "anti-testing" dogma. There are plenty of other places to find this information, but the best link is the one above.
Just remember, BIG ED hates testing because testing informs you of how effective BIG ED is at providing us with an "educated populace." The idea that "testing is bad" is a myth.
Your reaction to that last statement was a test. Did you pass?
