Testing and Social and Emotional Learning. Part 1.

Testing may be seen as an unnecessary evil by some educators. For others it can be a beneficial tool for effective teaching. The fundamental reason for testing should be to determine whether or not the student has acquired the particular skill being taught and is ready for further teaching. The method of evaluation should therefore depend on the skill being taught. For instance, the way to determine whether a student has learned how to test a food substance for the presence of simple sugar in science should certainly be different from the method of evaluating a student’s ability to solve a math problem.

I think a lot of the problems arising out of testing in schools now are because schooling has moved away from teaching skills and are now too focused on knowledge acquisition. This has forced evaluation to be a standardized process, since we mistakenly have come to believe that retention of knowledge could always be measured by a paper and pencil test. Whether or not the student actually understands and could apply the knowledge has also been ignored.

Standardized tests have been used more and more, reflecting just that trend in our education systems, that everyone needs to be able to reproduce the same material in just the same way. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (www.fairtest.org/facts/whatwron.htm) describe standardized tests as “tests in which all students answer the same questions, usually in multiple-choice format, and each question has only one correct answer. They reward the ability to quickly answer superficial questions that do not require real thought. They do not measure the ability to think or create in any field. Their use encourages a narrowed curriculum, outdated methods of instruction, and harmful practices such as retention in grade and tracking. They also assume all test takers have been exposed to white, middle-class background”. Although I presume that this is describing US standardized tests, I am sure some of it can hold true for national or standardized tests in most countries.

As a result many problems (and protests) have been associated with standardized tests . Among these problems are -: The so far unresolved issue of inequity in the education systems and how it affects the performance of students on standardized tests, especially low income students who do not have the same resources and opportunities for learning. Using the test scores to make decisions about the students , e.g. grade retention and denial of diploma, when in fact other information and qualities and abilities of the student are not taken into account.

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