Standardized Testing: Why Teachers Should Monitor Students

Is it really worth putting students’ health at risk to see how they have developed over the school year? Teachers all over the world are forced by the government, to test their students over everything their students have learned throughout the entire year. Students spend a great amount of time preparing and taking these tests, which takes up most of the teachers time to teach other important skills that the students need for the following years. Teachers should monitor students to ensure that students are making progress within the school year. A significant fact to consider about standardized testing, is that it often causes severe stress and anxiety in students. In addition to stress, standardized testing does not accommodate to all students.
Overall, standardized test are unable to correctly measure the growth in a student. According to Greenhaven Press, “Contrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement. They fail to measure such important attributes as creativity and critical thinking skills. Studies indicate that standardized tests reward superficial thinking and may discourage more analytical thinking. Additionally, because of the small sample of knowledge that is tested, standardized tests provide a very incomplete picture of student achievement.” The quote from above shows how students are graded based on a rubric and their creativity and critical thinking skills are not accounted for. According to Lynn Olson, “between 50-80% of student growth was temporary and shortly after they lost the gained knowledge and that there were no long term benefits.” (Study Questions Reliability of Single-Year Test-Score Gains). This study shows how students are taught skills so that they can do well on the test. However nhg , theses skills are taught so quickly, the newly introduced information does not stay with the student and they often forget the information. In summary, standardized testing is an inaccurate way of showing student progress because it does not account for students critical thinking or creativity, and the skills students often show on the tests are often lost, because they
One of two things must occur, teachers should monitor students progress within the year to ensure that they are continuing to make progress or government should continue to use standardized testing as a method to compare students to their peers. However, standardized testing often causes additional stress and anxiety in students. Also, standardized testing is not fair to all students, because some students come from diverse cultures where English is not the dominant language. Standardized testing is not the best way to track students yearly progress because often students develop stress and anxiety, and they often do not retain the information they are taught at the last minute before the test. In conclusion, standardized testing causes unnecessary added stress and anxiety in students and therefore it should no longer be used as a progress tracking system for