Charlie
16 years ago
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Standerized Testing in the Curriculum
Standardized testing is leads to a very controlled curriculum because it dictates what students must learn. I agree there are essential skills that students should learn, however, I do think some stuff is pushing it. In social studies, for instance, I think it is important to know about the make up the government or World War II, but standardized testing force schools to teach certain content because it will be on the exam. This creates a teacher centered learning environment that does not provide for a lot of time for students to explore things not covered in the textbook. Rather then a teacher centered approach, I think the students should have a voice in what they learn. If students learn about something that is interesting to them, it is easier to get more excited about it. For instance, my 7th grade students love studying ancient Egypt. If they love studying ancient Egypt, it would be a great time to do a PBL unit and let students explore. However, due to time constraints, there is not time to spend more then two weeks on Ancient Egypt because the curriculum demands they get through Medieval Europe this year. They get more of an overview, more then anything else and are forced to form generalizations. I would spend a little more time on the unit and design a way to put the learning in the student’s hands!
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4 comments:
Yeah tell me about it. McNeil talks about this as defensive teaching and there are four strategies that are used to silence students thoughts and curiosities.
1. Teachers control content by omission
2. Teachers control environment by mystifying course content.
3. Teachers fragment content
4. Teacher control course content by defensive simplication.
She says that teachers do this because they want their students "to comply with course requirements" and did so by reducing the standards and basically dumbing down the curriculum. Its sad that we have come to this...
I bet you could fit a PBL unit on Egypt into 2 weeks...maybe you should talk with your co-op.
I think it is great that you want to spend time on a subject that you know the students will really enjoy, but at the same time we do, as teachers, have time restraints. I think that maybe you could still do a PBL lesson on Egypt though. Perhaps just make it less times consuming. That way the students will get to do a student-centered activity and they can still learn and get through the content that is needed to get through. One thought about the standardized tests. I, personally, do not think that standardized tests truly show or assess how much a student has “learned”. More it is to test how much information a student can remember. This is a problem for a few reasons. One, rote learning is not a sufficient or a real type of learning. Students can recall a list of words, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know and truly understand the concepts behind them. Secondly, a lot of students may have test anxiety. I know I do, and that can hinder or prevent them from getting an accurate assessment of how much they truly know. On the other hand though, one question that I have is if we get rid of the standardized tests, how can we assess how the students are progressing? Just a thought. I see good and bad with standardized testing.
I agree with you when you said standardized testing leads to a very controlled curriculum. Ever since I started taking my education classes, I was aware of the "teaching to the test" issue, but it wasn't until I started my middle school teaching when I realized how much these tests do limit the teachers. I've seen my co-op barely "teach" the students important content because there simply isn't enough time before the test. For example, my teacher taught the students about figurative language and everything that is involved with that within 5 minutes, because "the test will be testing you on this content." I guess a question I still have is, how are these tests really helping the students? I'm not so sure it is...
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