Issues with Standardized Testing and Why they need to go
You're invigilating a classroom filled with students of differing learning capabilities, and you begin to notice how every student responds to the questions on the paper. There's John in the front, confident about every word written, re-reading answers before moving on to the next question. There's Divya seated in the third row, chewing on her pen, not looking too good at what's put in front of her. You take a good look at everyone's facial expression with one thought replaying in your mind: how long are these pile of papers going to take to assess?
Issues with standardized testing
Standardized tests have been around for decades. Schools assess students on the knowledge they pass on at the end of a semester, and the process repeats. Everyone dislikes these particular weeks, but we've grown to accept it rather than question it. The performance of a student is recorded and reported to their respective parents every month, with little to no action taken after the meeting. We have accepted this monotony in education without wondering about what could be.
These tests often measure performance of a student more than the knowledge they've acquired. Teachers feel frustration when students are unable to use the information they receive outside the classroom. Tests such as these are comparative rather than informative, and offer no information on the learning pattern of a student. Teachers, who also feel frustration, have more power than they think to bring about change required in the system. Change starts from frustration; no one wants to correct pile loads of papers and not have their students use any of what they write in the coming years.
Here are 4 reasons why standardized tests need to leave:
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Promoting everything other learning. Standardized tests do a fine job in promoting competition rather than promoting newer methods of understanding different learning techniques. These create artificial hierarchies, that discourage students from learning.
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Everyone gets affected. Reflective students require a certain amount of time to process the information that's put forth before them, while students who generally perform well make mistakes in the most obvious of places. It affects students that excel as well, as they would focus on their grade, leaving behind feedback and methods of possible improvement.
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Self-assessment is the way to go. These are skills that are required in any field a student wishes to pursue. When teachers offer an environment that helps a student to critically analyze their work or the work submitted by their peers, it makes learning more engaging. Sound judgment and critical analysis of material handed to a student will allow them to find methods to improve existing content and create better ones in the future.
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Encouragement is one of the keys to success. Its important that the administration, consisting of the school as well as teaching staff, find methods to offer for such classroom environments. Rather than having students learning to forget later on, administrations can connect with other schools or teachers that use varying methods to educate their students that earn better results. The more opinions you receive, the better you're able to understand where and how you start the process of change.
Solving the mess we've made
Teachers need to adopt what Welby Ings, calls "Disobedient Teaching", where he encourages teachers to try to bring change to the classroom with the help of creative challenges, which enables a student to look at this process of learning as a positive experience. Changing the future of education using technological advancements is the way forward, and adopting it to aid teachers in the completion of their mundane tasks, will enable the future generations to learn more than what is provided to them.
Plugging in games during classroom hours, and using techniques such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to guide a student to make the right career choices, is the change that is needed to make learning engaging, fun, and educative. As fields have been reformed with the help of the latest innovations in the field, its imperative that we use these advancements to raise the bars for what education is to be tomorrow.
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