Social Forces in the Use of Standardized Tests in the U.S. Education System (Research Paper Sample)

Social Forces in the Use of Standardized Tests in the U.S. Education System
Social Forces in the Use of Standardized Tests in the U.S. Education System
Part One: Article Summary
In the journal article “Perils of Standardized Achievement Testing” by Thomas M. Haladyna, the author argues that the popularity of standardized testing is an intellectual development that is being encouraged by social institutions and ideologies. Institutions, such as the political ruling class and policy makers in the education system put pressure on teachers to provide evidence that they are doing their job accordingly. Ideologies like the free market economy encourages competition in education and in the job market, making society to value standardized tests as indispensable yardsticks for evaluating qualification for promotion into higher grades and the job market. Cheating occurs as the destructive consequence of society’s emphasis on high performance as the gateway into better academic and economic opportunities. The author’s major thesis is that for standardized tests to achieve what they are intended to do (assess student achievement), there is need to improve their validity by minimizing chances for cheating and discouraging teachers’ tendency to focus on examinable content.
The federal government, through the National Assessment of Educational Progress, represents the institutional force that reinforces the use of standardized tests as the ideal tool for measuring student achievement. Teachers use the outcome of these tests not only to assess student learning, but also adjust their teaching approaches to suit learners’ needs. The inherent intellectual ideology in this approach is that standardized tests improves the quality of learning by helping teachers identify learning problems in students, and address them through remedial teaching or repeating of the course material. The author supports this idea by stating that “Assessment, a judgment about student learning, helps plan future instruction” (Haladyna, 2006, p. 32). However, he cautions that this approach is not a comprehensive way of improving education standards because standardized testing is just but a single source of information, which makes it “short-sighted, narrow, and inadequate” (Haladyna, 2006, p. 32). Moreover, standardized tests are limited by their inability to overcome the threats to validity, such as students’ reading handicaps, cheating, and subjective test-scoring approaches adopted by teachers. When students cheat, the test scores are biased because they do not reflect the actual competence of the learner. Teachers can also cheat by testing learners on the few topics they have covered, or awarding marks generously. In this regard, teachers may also act as part of the intellectual class that not only encourage standardized testing, but also contributes to declining education standards.
In this regard, the frequent tendency with which standardized scores measure student learning inaccurately suggest that teachers, the public and policy makers may actually be doing more harm than good to the students. This is because poorly set and administered standardized tests give a false impression of learners’ abilities, which prevent teachers, parents, or policy makers from detecting problems in the learning processand address them in time.
The author suggests that institutional reforms are necessary to make standardized tests have a positive impact in education. The first step is adopting an objective and well-defined interpretation of test-scores. For instance, teachers should specify the achievement level at which a learners’ abilities should be described as proficient, average, above average, or below average. This would help avoid making arbitrary judgments on the learners’ level of understanding. The second step, and the most important, is eliminating the threats to test validity. This involves minimizing cases of cheating by teachers and students. Achieving this goal can help restore the credibility of the evaluation process.Teachers should adopt ethical practices in teaching by ensuring that they cover the required syllabus sufficiently and provide remedial teaching before administering tests. The setting for taking the tests should also provide a fair playing ground for all learners to ensure that some do not benefit from others, such as by sitting for the same time and taking the test after learning similar content. The author’s conclusion emphasizes the need for ensuring validity especially in high-stake tests, such as those that determine graduation or promotion to the next level. Only then will the public’s confidence in standardized testing be justified.
Part Two: Analysis
The relevance of standardized testing in measuring student achievement is one of the controversial intellectual issues in the American education system. Proponents of standardized tests argue that they promote academic growth by holding education institutions accountable for student outcome. Similarly, it provides useful information for policy makers, which they use to provide learning resources to poor-performing schools/districts and offer remedial teaching to students who perform below average. In this regard, authorities in the education represent the power base that make standardized tests an important aspect of education because they use the this information to make decisions about resource allocation.
The author of the summarized article makes relevant observations about the nature of education in America. The convergence of political and public expectations mount pressure on teachers to show that students are learning. The political class and the public rely on standardized tests to determine if teachers are meeting their responsibilities. However, placing such pressure on teachers hinders learners’ intellectual development because teachers would want to protect themselves and secure their jobs and careers. Consequently, they may be tempted to give the public and political leaders what they want to see- high performances in students. Accordingly, teachers can manipulate the teaching, testing and scoring process to create the impression that learners have mastered the syllabus content. This approach is what is commonly referred to as “teaching to the test,” a teaching strategy in which the teacher focuses on examinable material only. Additionally, teachers can inflate the scoring scale (awarding more marks than the learners deserve) to have more A’s than B’s and C’s.
In light of the ...