Kiersten Greene, PhD, is an assistant professor of literacy education at SUNY New Paltz. She was born in the Hudson Valley, and recently returned to the region after living in New York City for 15 years, where she taught 5th grade. When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, you can find her knitting.
Do you have a homework question for Kiersten? Submit your question here.
Dear Kiersten, How will my child’s
individual test score affect her personally?
The short answer is: it’s unclear.
Standardized tests are, in theory, a way for teachers,
administrators, and parents to gauge whether or not children are meeting
grade-appropriate benchmarks as they journey through school. In reality,
standardized tests are not about children or measuring their strengths and
weaknesses — they’re about something else entirely.
Remember taking standardized tests in elementary school when
we were kids? Those of us who went to public school in the 70s or 80s (or
thereabouts) took standardized tests at one point or another. We didn’t have
months and months of test prep, and our individual scores weren’t etched on our
psyches and attached to our names as young children. Test day came and went
without much fanfare, and schooling continued without extended interruption or
the accompanying panic of today’s tests.
Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but back then, the stakes
weren’t so high — information gathered by standardized tests wasn’t used to
assess our teachers or determine the amount of funding our schools would
receive. In fact, I don’t know what happened to the test score data from tests
back in elementary school—no one really talked about it after test day. Other
than receiving suggestions about possible future careers (does anyone else
remember those exams?), I’m not sure any of the assessment data made its way back
into our curriculum or informed my teachers’ teaching.
Your question is great on so many levels, because it
forces us to step back and focus on the simplest-but-most-difficult-to-answer
question: why are we testing students again?
There is the obvious — we need benchmarks that help
teachers, parents, and administrators understand whether or not students are on
target at any given grade level. And of
course it’s helpful to have a system for measuring progress across a span of
years — adjusting our practice according to students’ needs is, after all, only
possible when we gather information. But the levels of anxiety and stress that
students currently experience as a result of all the test-prep-driven
instruction in our schools is a high price to pay in exchange for test scores
that don’t directly drive instruction.
Out of curiosity, I did a cursory Google search for various
iterations of the following: “how are standardized test scores used?” and “what
does my child’s test score mean?” Most of the links in the search results pointed
to sites that explain the deleterious effects of high-stakes testing on our
children today. While Google doesn’t have all the answers, you generally know
something is amiss when it fails to produce answers to seemingly straightforward
questions.
I am almost certain that your child’s test score has the
potential to affect her emotions, her confidence, and her future relationship
to testing. But beyond that, I’m not sure her test score has any personal
effect at all.
Read more answers to Common Core questions