Is Standardized Testing Actually Measuring What It Claims To Measure? A Teacher’s Perspective
It’s 8:17 a.m. the second week of May, heat already seeping through the cracked classroom window above my paperback bookshelf, the intercom just crackled its third reminder that day: no extra scrap paper, no whispered questions, even a broken pencil requires a straight-up hand raise and a five-minute wait while I circle around to you. I step past Mia’s desk, and I see her twisting that frayed rainbow hair tie she’s had since third grade so hard her knuckle goes white. She’s staring at the test question glowing on her school-issued laptop: What is the main claim the author makes about hummingbird migration in paragraph 3?
I know Mia. She spends every weekend at her grandma’s house ten minutes outside town, refilling hummingbird feeders and logging visits in a beat-up spiral notebook. Last fall, she gave a 10-minute unprompted presentation to the class, pulling out photos of 12 different hummingbirds she spotted in the yard all winter, proof you don’t have to take all feeders down before the first frost. The test passage? It says all North American hummingbirds migrate south before temperatures drop. Mia catches my eye, raises her hand a tiny crack, and whispers, “Miss, the passage is wrong. Do I answer what it says, or what’s true?”
I shrugged, quiet as I could, and told her she had to go with what the passage said. She frowned, filled in the bubble, and I caught her scribble a tiny note in the edge of her scratch paper (against all the rules) that said actually this is wrong I saw them. That moment stuck with me, because it cut straight to the question I’ve been asking myself every testing season for the past seven years: are we even measuring what we think we are anymore?
I saw the same disconnect last year with my neighbor’s 13-year-old son Javi. Javi fixes small engines for neighbors for $15 an hour, rebuilt the entire frame of a go-cart from scrap he pulled out of a junkyard, and fixed my wobbly front porch step last summer in 20 minutes flat. He got his state standardized math score back last spring, and it said “below basic.” His mom was already filling out the forms for mandatory summer school, convinced he was falling behind, until I sat down with her to look through the score breakdown. 80% of the questions he missed were multi-step word problems that rewarded rigid, step-by-step algebra formulas on paper. Javi solves problems the way he builds things: he estimates, he adjusts, he uses spatial reasoning to get the right answer faster than any formula I can pull off. The test didn’t care that he got the right answer if he didn’t do it the way the test maker wanted. It never thought to measure how good he is at actually solving real math problems that come up in real life.
We hear all the time that standardized tests measure college readiness, critical thinking, how well schools are teaching kids the basics. But what I see every year is that tests actually measure how good a kid is at taking standardized tests. They measure how well you can guess what the person who wrote the question wants you to say, even when that answer doesn’t line up with what you know to be true. They measure how calm you are under weird, arbitrary rules, how much test prep your school could afford to cram into the month before testing, whether you didn’t have a sibling up sick all night the night before, or a fight with your friend before school, or anxiety that makes your brain go blank when someone is timing you. What they don’t measure is how good you are at asking questions when something is wrong, or solving a problem that doesn’t have one pre-written answer, or building something that works, or noticing things that other people miss.
I’ve figured out a few small, doable things that help me and the parents I work with keep this all in perspective, no big overhauls required. For teachers, instead of giving up an entire month of actual learning for nonstop test prep, I do 10 minutes of practice a day for two weeks. That’s enough to show kids how the digital test works, how to narrow down multiple choice answers, what to do if they get stuck. I don’t cancel recess or art to do extra practice, because I know a well-rested kid who gets to create things is going to do better than a kid who’s drilled on test questions until they’re burnt out. For parents, the week before testing, I tell them three specific things to do: keep your exact same bedtime and breakfast routine, don’t change anything to “accommodate” the test – big changes just add anxiety. Don’t promise a new video game or a special trip for a good score, that just makes kids think their worth is tied to the number. Tell them straight: “I just want you to try your best, and whatever this score says, it doesn’t change what I know you can do.”
After you get the score back, I tell parents to ask two specific questions before they panic or sign up for extra tutoring: “What was the hardest part of that test day for you?” and “What’s one thing you’re really good at that wasn’t on that test?” It keeps the score in perspective, and reminds kids that there’s way more to them than one number from one test on one Tuesday in May.
I got Mia’s test results back a month ago. She hit proficient, the bar the state says all fourth graders need to hit. If you just look at the number, it looks like everything worked out. But I know that the hummingbird question, the one she got right on the test because she answered what the passage said, it still sticks with me. She knew the real answer, the one that came from her own time outside watching birds, writing down what she saw, questioning what she read. That’s the skill I care way more about than any main idea question. We don’t have a perfect fix for this, not right now. But when a 9-year-old has to choose between what she knows is true and getting the test question right, it’s pretty clear what we’re actually measuring – and it’s not the thing that matters most.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is Standardized Testing Actually Measuring What It Claims To Measure