Even before the days of "No Child Left Behind," states administered standardized tests to students and the results were tied to state funding. Now, the first thing most people say is, "What's wrong with that? Shouldn't we be holding our schools accountable?" My response is twofold.
Yes, schools should be held accountable for enabling students to reach the various content area benchmarks. The problem with the way we test our students is that the results are directly tied to funding. In other words, schools with high rates of success on the test receive more funding than schools that perform at lower levels. In addition to that backward way of handling funding (punishing students who obviously need an adjusted instructional structure and methodology), students who are capable of functioning and thriving at higher levels are held back all in the name of money.
Building on my first response, students are cheated out of the remediation or enrichment they need because of the "one size fits all" curriculum approach used by most states. Let's look at this a little more closely. The tests are based on a set of standards (again, there's nothing wrong with having standards...they are essential to curriculum development and instructional methodology), which generally represent the most basic levels of knowledge and comprehension for each content area. The words knowledge and comprehension are important because they represent the lowest levels in Bloom's Taxonomy of higher-order thinking skills. Here's a visual representation of the taxonomy:
To make sense of this, let's look at each level and what skills are involved:
Evaluation - Making judgments based on internal evidence or external criteria. In other words, a student who has the ability to evaluate can draw conclusions and back up those conclusions with evidence. This is the highest level of thinking, according to Bloom.
Synthesis - Rearranging component ideas into a new whole. In other words, students functioning at this level are able to take concepts they've learned and see how they relate to each other. Then, they are able to create a new mental structure including the relationships they've discovered.
Analysis - Breaking down objects or ideas into simpler parts and seeing how the parts relate and are organized. In other words, students functioning at this level are able to disassemble complex concepts and discover relationships within each individual concept. *Note: The difference between analysis and synthesis is that analysis deals with relationships within a single concept while synthesis deals with relationships among several concepts.
Application - Applying knowledge to actual situations. A good example of application is taking knowledge of math operations and being able to calculate the number of calories for 2 servings of cereal based on the information provided on the nutrition label.
Comprehension - Grasping the meaning of information. Basically, this means reading a story and being able to retell it or answer basic questions about what was read. This also applies to gathering information from visuals such as graphs and charts.
Knowledge - Remembering previously learned information. Teachers like to refer to this as regurgitation, simply because that's all they're asking students to do. For example, a teacher might give a lesson about nouns and emphasize that nouns can be people, places and things. Then, students are immediately asked to repeat that definition and practice it in some independent activity form.
Now that we have an idea of the hierarchy of thinking skills, let's look at the standards on which the high-stakes tests are based. Generally speaking, state tests only require students to display mastery at the knowledge and comprehension levels. Since funding is tied to student performance, school districts require what I like to call, "kill and drill," strategies that only focus on those two lowest levels of thinking skills.
In any classroom situation, there will be students who are below grade level in certain content areas, at grade level, or above grade level. Under the system that is in place now, students needing extra help don't receive it, and students who are capable of reaching higher order skills aren't allowed to reach their individual potentials.
What are the adverse effects? Students who graduate and go on to college are handicapped because they haven't been taught how to think. Knowledge and comprehension are necessary because they are the starting points...the basis of developing more complex thinking skills. But, students who aren't equipped with the tools to tap into that thinking potential face a very difficult road in colleges...if not failure. Students who graduate and go directly into the workforce face similar problems and risk staying in jobs that are low-paying and offer little to no opportunity for advancement.
As long as states continue this, for lack of a more eloquent way of putting it, money grubbing testing procedures they will continue to cheat our children out of the education they need and deserve.
