There are many people who object to the use of standardized assessments to provide information about the academic progress of children. These objections generally revolve around the fact that one test cannot accurately gauge the progress of so many different personality types and learning styles, and around the fact that many standardized assessments contain inherent cultural biases that make them unfit measuring tools for students from a diverse collection of backgrounds. However, standardized assessments have more benefits for teachers and educational planners than they have drawbacks. They provide evidence of validity, calibration and reliability for tests and curricula, and they also provide helpful feedback to teachers, parents and students.
In an ideal situation, standardized tests help show students their educational gaps and strengths, indicating to them the things they still have to learn. The purpose of this feedback is to inspire students to apply even more effort to their own learning so that they bridge those gaps. One interesting research study, though, showed that when students self-report grades before they take assessments, the self-report outcomes have a high level of correlation with their real outcomes. The implication is that if you ask a student to predict how he or she will do on a particular assessment, the answer that you get will be significantly accurate (Hattie 2009). This begs the question of why we administer standardized assessments in the first place. After all, millions of dollars are poured into the companies that write the tests, and school districts spend millions more in resources designed to help students prepare specifically for these tests. One problem is that minority students have a more difficult time being accurate about the ability that they think they have. An analysis of students in New Zealand found that Pasifika and Maori students tend to be about two academic years behind the students in the majority ethnic background. However, a survey given nationwide to students finding out their own opinions of their ability and comparing those opinions to their actual outcomes in writing and mathematics found that the Pasifika and Maori groups were unable to come to an accurate understanding of their own abilities (Otunuku and Brown 2007). And so if student self-awareness is supposed to be an accurate form of assessment, students must first attain a reasonably precise sense of where they stand academically, and this is one reason why standardized assessments are such a helpful tool for teachers. Once students understand where they actually stand in terms of academic performance, it is easier for teachers to motivate them to move toward the place where they need to be.
When students believe that they can accurately predict their results, rather than relying on standardized assessments, another problem that can arise is artificially low scores for students on the assessments that they do take. A lot of times, students will move toward a fairly safe goal, thinking that meeting a goal is better than failing to meet one. However, this often means that students do not do as well as they could have (Suggate and Reese, 2009). They believe that they can definitely get a particular score, and so they do not push themselves. Accurate student standardized assessments give students a more accurate picture of their strengths as well as their weaknesses, and knowing their strengths can help motivate students to strive even higher.
Some teachers believe that giving students more subjective ways to demonstrate their skill in a particular subject area leads to a more accurate assessment. Some of these subjective products include portfolios, essays, and performances. However, while these assessment products do point students toward higher order levels of thinking with these tasks, they also are much more problematic for the assessor. Research has shown that there is a tendency to inflate these types of scores, for several different reasons, including the belief that mediocre grades might not reflect student quality – a bias that is natural given the relationship that grows between teachers and students – as well as the individual tendencies of different teachers for being difficult or lenient graders. Also, teacher fatigue can change the perception of different performances over time, so a student whose performance takes place during the first academic period of the day might get a better or worse grade than a performance of similar skill and mastery in the last academic period of the day, because the teacher’s mental state is likely to be different at the beginning and end of the day (Lane and Stone 2006). Similar concerns about teacher rating processes are the explanation behind the recommendation for the use of marker panels, rubrics and multiple assessment tasks in order to ensure that the student receives the most accurate feedback possible. Standardized assessments lack all of these shortcomings, as the answers are always the same, and the grading process is highly calibrated. The multiple choice questions do not have any human factors in grading at all, but the written responses are also evaluated by readers who go through a sophisticated process of calibration in order to assume that the same rating from different readers would have the same implication for the student’s level of mastery.
Another advantage of standardized assessment is that it takes the social element out of testing. Classrooms are necessarily social spaces. When teachers lead activities, part of their challenge is to ensure that all students in the classroom are engaged in the activity. Part of that engagement, though, means that many students are paying attention to one another at any given time. These social spaces require a great deal of psychological trust and safety to be at work. Students must be able to rely on each other not to make fun of them for giving assessment responses that are not on the mark. Also, the students must be able to trust that the teacher won’t take offense if, in self-assessment, the student communicates that he still does not understand a concept that the teacher has covered several times. This can lead to frustration on the part of the teacher and a desire to ostracize the less successful on the part of the other students in the room (Cowie 2009). In the end, students who do not have that level of trust will not give accurate self-assessments in the classroom. Many classroom environments lack the extremely high levels of trust that are necessary for accurate and candid self-assessment, which is why standardized assessments are helpful. They take the social elements out of assessment and allow students to express what they know in a setting tha tis safe and confidential. Ultimately, this is the sort of assessment that provides the best snapshot of student ability.
Works Cited
Cowie, B. (2009). My teacher and my friends helped me learn: student perceptions and
experiences of classroom assessment. In D.M. McInerney, G.T.L. Brown and G.A.D Liem (Eds.), Student Perspectives on Assessment: What Students Can Tell Us About Assessment for Learning (pp. 85-105). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of meta-analyses in education. London: Routledge.
Lane, S. and Stone, C.A. (2006). Performance assessment. In R.L. Brennan (Ed.), Educational
Measurement (4th ed., pp. 387-431. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Otunuku, M. and Brown, G.T.L. (2007). Tongan students’ attitudes toward their subjects in New
Zealand relative to their academic achievement. Asia Pacific Education Review 8(1): 117- 128. Doi: 10.1007/BF03025838
Suggate, S. and Reese, E. (2012). Contemporary debates in childhood education and
development. London: Routledge.
