Teaching to the test detrimental to the education system

June 6, 2011 — by Jackie Gu

A 7th-grade public school teacher in Oakland is preparing her students for impending STAR tests by drilling them with facts, dates and formulas. She gives them endless worksheets repeatedly reviewing the same concepts. Her schools is ranked one of the lowest in the state, and if her students score under the mark, they risk significant budget cuts.

A 7th-grade public school teacher in Oakland is preparing her students for impending STAR tests by drilling them with facts, dates and formulas. She gives them endless worksheets repeatedly reviewing the same concepts. Her schools is ranked one of the lowest in the state, and if her students score under the mark, they risk significant budget cuts.

By contrast, a 7th-grade teacher from an affluent private school feels no need to specifically prepare his students for these tests. His students anticipate STAR test days as breaks from the usual academic rigor rather than exams worth stressing over.

His style of teaching contrasts greatly with that of the poorer school’s teacher: rather than using the “drill and kill” method, he uses an inquiry-based style of teaching that enables his students to develop critical thinking skills. He gives them labs and experiments with open-ended results, for example, and guides them to desired learning goals without explicitly telling them what they are.

In poorer schools, teachers often feel pressured to abandon such methods due to the weight that state and federal governments place on standardized testing. This means that the students at these schools, those who most need to be taught the value of education, are instead presented with worksheets and flashcards as methods of learning, making school an endless series of painful memorization for them. The fiscal punishments forced upon lower-performing schools only serve to undermine the potential these schools have for successful teaching.

The concept of teaching to the test is perhaps one of the most ineffective and damaging methods of educating students. When teachers tailor educational material to fit solely that which will be tested, students become restricted to learning only the material required in specific standards.

However, the practice of teaching to the test leads teachers to focus more on what is probable to appear on standardized testing than actual course material. The result is that students learning only to fill their brains with the dry facts and formulas they are given. They are taught how to memorize rather than to truly understand the material; to store information in their heads, but not to expand their knowledge of a subject with critical thinking. The value of inquiry-based learning is lost in the rush to prepare for standardized tests; which, in AP courses, lasts for the entire duration of the school year.

This time spent in preparation for testing is valuable time wasted. Through the education system, students should be instilled with the values of lifelong learning and prepared for real-world application, not drilled with facts and questions that will appear on AP tests or SATs but never again in their lifetimes.

Because of the progressively weighted influence of test scores on high-stakes decisions such as college admissions and school ratings, teachers and students alike have heavy incentive to use every method possible to ensure that students will score highly. However, while students are motivated by the promise of high achievement, teacher incentive stems from actual monetary benefit.

The Chicago Public School system embraced high-stakes testing in 1996 by enforcing a policy where a school with low scores would be placed on probation, facing the possibility of its staff being dismissed. By linking student test scores to teacher employment, high-stakes testing pushes teachers to target test specifics in teaching curriculum or even cheat.

In 2010, fifth-grade teacher Scott Mueller from Milford, Ohio, was discovered to have helped his students cheat on their standardized math exam. He had peeked at the tests in advance and copied them word-for-word onto study guides he handed his students the day before they tested. Upon exposure, Mueller resigned from his position and his teaching license was suspended. Similar situations show teachers acting as platforms for cheating by coaching students on test specifics or staying after school to re-bubble their students’ answer keys with the correct answers, tampering directly with the forms.

Teaching to the test also makes it nearly impossible to draw valid conclusions about a student’s intellectual capability based on such standardized testing. Perhaps adapting a more inquiry-based form of teaching will result in students capable of critical thinking that will benefit them throughout their lives, or even infuse them with the love of learning, rather than the grade- and test-obsessed teaching style too common in public schooling today.

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