Burkins & Yaris

Hotels Find

List of best hotels

Discover Your Perfect Stay

Blog

3 Reasons Increased Standardized Testing is Truly a Great Thing

More and more, we are encountering schools where students are not only engaged in the traditional weeks of standardized testing across math, reading, writing, science, etc., but also in regular benchmark testing and test preparation that are aligned to the summative assessments. The influence of standardized testing is particularly prominent in the area of reading instruction. For example, Kim’s son’s fifth-grade class recently had a full week of practice testing where the practice was thoughtfully designed to replicate the actual assessments the students will take in May. This means that all the routines and procedures, including the amount of time allotted, were factored into the rehearsal. You may find it surprising that we see a number of benefits to such increases in standardized testing and all the supporting standardized preparation.
Reason #1: Children’s books are expensive. Using excellent children’s literature to teach children to read and write requires that schools research and purchase excellent literature. As time spent testing and preparing to test expands, hopefully, it will push children’s literature right out of classrooms. This will free up more money for practice test materials, while eliminating the need for school libraries. Focusing time and money resources around testing promises that children will score better on tests, which means that they will know more about reading and writing.
Reason #2: Now, teachers have to spend a lot of time getting to know the individual students in their classrooms. They have to differentiate instruction based on the needs of their students. Student skill levels vary broadly and it is time-consuming and challenging for teachers to modify each lesson to meet the needs of every child. Why in the world aren’t more teachers–who know the time it takes to plan excellent lessons that differentiate support for varying student needs–thrilled that more and more instructional time is dedicated to test practice, which utilizes one-size-fits-all materials and requires little (if any) planning from them? If standardized testing and the surrounding preparation continue to expand, students will have truly equal learning opportunities and teachers won’t have to know their students or plan for instruction at all. It’s a win-win.
Reason #3: Most importantly, the long range implications of increased testing promise us all a better future. By standardizing instruction through standardized testing, we can finally standardize children. By narrowing the ideas we expose them to, we can narrow the things children think about and, subsequently, narrow their actions. Children who conform are more likely to grow up to be adults who conform. Imagine a world where there are no random, wild ideas causing disruptive public debate. Imagine a world where no one breaks any laws because everyone thinks and acts the very same way. We are on our way to the kind of conformity that only the most creative of dictators has ever imagined.

What is “Reading”?

In our work in schools, we are constantly engaged in conversations about the print and meaning aspects of reading and/or writing. There are often conversations about which is more important— Decoding or comprehension? Mechanics or ideas? For us, the two are really one. That is, you don’t have reading without decoding and understanding. Similarly, there is no writing without attention to conventions and to idea communication.
With so much energy directed towards standardized test scores and, in turn, towards the discrete measures that often inform accountability conversations, it is easy to get distracted by the sub-skills that contribute to reading and writing. Because beginning reading materials are often barren of substantive meaning and we are understandably enthusiastic about beginning reader’s improved proficiency with the print system, it is easy to forget that reading involves both decoding and understanding. To say, “She can read anything, but she just doesn’t understand what she is reading,” is inaccurate. To “read” without understanding is to word-call.
Similarly, if we say, “He is a good writer. He just doesn’t really have anything to write about,” we again miss the reading/writing boat. Writing, like reading, involves the integration of two things: facility with the written code and the ability to gather, organize, and communicate ideas. Writers who can spell and have nice handwriting are not necessarily “good writers.” Students who have skills and nothing to say are not yet writers, either, as writing is about communicating.
We invite you to define reading and writing in ways that consider both their print and the meaning dimensions. We offer a word of caution, however. Our suggestion that reading and writing are incomplete if students don’t attend to meaning—comprehending what they are reading and/or communicating ideas through writing—does not imply that print facility is not important. We can argue just as staunchly for the reverse.

“Connecting” to the Transformative Power of Reading

Since the Common Core Standards were introduced, educators have been debating the role that text-to-self connections play in students’ reading.  Initially, the message was “Students must read within the ‘four corners’ of the text. Connections don’t matter.” Fortunately, much of the educational community understood that this directive was an over correction in response to a legitimate concern that text-to-text connections had supplanted text-based responses almost completely. While we agree that there is a need to turn considerable attention towards the “four corners of the text,” more than ever, we recognize the power of personal connections with text. Most importantly, we see the ways these personal connections actually lead to deeper understanding of the words on the page.
For example, this morning, in an independent reading conference Kendra, a fifth-grade girl reading Kate di Camillo’s Because of Winn Dixie, expressed that reading the book felt especially good to her because it helped her understand something she had never experienced in her own life.  Kendra spoke about the character, Amanda, whose younger brother, Carson, had drowned. Kendra explained, “I don’t know anybody who ever drowned but I do know that it sadly happens.  I get why Amanda is always acting so moody.  It’s like she’s clouded in sadness. If I lost someone who I cared about, that’s exactly how I’d feel, too.”
While authors layer the “four corners of text” with rich details and ideas meant for readers to read closely and understand,  very often, their higher purpose for doing this is to communicate something important about the human condition. When readers marry those details and ideas with their background knowledge and preconceived understandings of the world, they receive entrée to a new level of understanding. The potential connection to their deeper empathy and humanity is what sends the powerful message that reading is not just a thing that you do for school or to pass time, but rather, it is that thing you do because is transformative.