For GUILFORD COUNTY school board

Testing: We’re Doing It Wrong  

As the end of the school year rolls around, students and staff are preparing for a variety of end of year tests.   Unfortunately, tests intended to provide an objective measurement of student growth and achievement too often result in stress, anxiety, and inadequate, unusable data.  Instead of discarding the whole idea of standardized tests, however, we can achieve their intended benefits by changing the way we test.  By changing the tests we take and the way we approach them, we can reduce student and teacher anxiety, restore instructional time, and personalize instruction with better, more relevant data.

Standardized test data are only as good as the tests themselves, and we can do much better than what we have now.  The best tests

• Are nationally-normed so we can gauge how our students are performing compared to students across the country.
  
• Are adaptive, so we can have useful data from our highest and lowest performers, not just our average students.
  
• Provide timely data that can be used to immediately inform instruction.
  
• Provide specific data on how well each student has mastered various topics.
  
• Provide accessible reports that show parents how their students are performing and how they have or have not grown over time.
  
• Are consistent across grade levels to show an accurate pattern of growth and achievement from one year to the next.
  

Tests that have these benefits already exist.  Some schools in North Carolina and Guilford County already are using them to help students, teachers, administrators, and parents plan and adjust to maximize student growth and achievement.  Of course, changing state mandated tests will need to be done at the state level.  But Guilford County Schools can make some changes right now, while still complying with state mandates, that will improve the testing environment and result in better, more useful data.  GCS can choose to give quality, nationally-normed standardized tests in addition to the state mandated tests.  If carefully implemented, this one change could have a significant, positive impact on instruction.

No matter what tests are given, we must change the testing environment.  There is no excuse for a large number of students to experience testing anxiety.  Parents should not lose sleep over a standardized test.  Teachers should not be tied up in knots over a standardized test.  When teachers start talking about the EOGs in the first week of school, when some schools have EOG celebrations, when some schools stop instruction for weeks at a time to practice EOG packets, how do you expect students to feel?  When the test is the focus, when test days become the most important days of the year, it’s our kids who lose.

Test results are important, but they are only part of the picture.  The stakes are high, but what does that really mean?  We have spent many years worrying about how high the stakes are and over-focusing on standardized tests and what has happened?  As a whole, our scores are not great.  Some are abysmal.  We haven’t raised achievement across the board.  We haven’t closed the achievement gap; in some cases it has actually grown.  Maybe, just maybe, we are focusing on the wrong things.  Maybe we need to adjust our focus.  Maybe we need to get back to delivering quality instruction of quality content and let the tests fall where they may.  If students are learning and growing at an acceptable rate, then the desired test scores will follow. 

MARY CATHERINESAUER