Standardized Testing - Results, Effects, and Validity

Over the past decade, our nation has been on the decline in comparison to other nations in the success rates of education.  In fear of foreign competition, our government has developed ways to test our students in order to successfully check the success of our educational system and therefore better understand how to help our students.  One way that our government has decided to do this is to implement standardized tests across the nation each year to test the knowledge of children.  A standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a standard manner and they are designed in a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent.  In doing so, all tests administered are scored in a predetermined manner and can be distributed to an entire body of students across a state or even across the entire nation. 

Standardized tests are perceived as being more fair than non-standardized tests and the consistency permits a more reliable comparison of outcomes across all test takers.  However, it is still questionable if these tests will produce an accurate result of one student’s intelligence, or if they will just show the amount of knowledge different schools across the United States distribute to their children and the quality of education at each of these schools.  One question has remained to persist over time: should we use standardized testing to asses our student’s knowledge and learning abilities?  Because of the ranging opinions on this subject matter, I decided to interview a current professor as well as a current education major to see the opinions of two people on two different ends of the spectrum. 

My first interview was conducted with Professor Splaine, a current instructor for the course EDPS301, Foundations of Education.  In order to assess her opinion, I asked her a few simple questions.  After asking her if she believed that standardized testing yields accurate results in testing a students learning abilities and knowledge, her response showed what I believe to be her true opinion on standardized testing.  

After interviewing Professor Splaine, I decided to interview a peer, Katherine Wellington, a very wise education major with a junior standing.  As education majors, much of what we are taught is how to improve education for the future and we are constantly being encouraged to create our own opinions on what we believe education should be.  After interviewing Katherine, I learned that she was a teachers aid for a middle school class in order to fulfill the requirements of the course EDCI280.  I came to understand the effects standardized testing had on the specific students Katherine Wellington observed.  My understanding of Katherine’s opinions on standardized testing derived out of two specific questions:

What effects did you see standardized testing have on these students?

Do you believe standardized testing yields valuable results in showing the intelligence of one student? 

After researching and interviewing, I have come to the conclusion that standardized testing is clearly a topic of discussion amongst educators and must be further evaluated.  Katherine offered me her opinion on what the next precautions on education should be.