Last week my group members and I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Jackie Edmondson, the Associate Vice President and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at Penn State, to ask her some of our biggest questions about primary and secondary education. We spent a lot of time discussing student assessment as well as teacher assessment. I left her office with a wealth of new information and a new perspective.
When we got onto the topic of assessment, the first thing that Dr. Edmondson pointed out was that the actual meaning of assessment is to sit beside someone. What we call “assessment” now a days is more so evaluation and measuring. Two issues with this are reliability and validity. Dr. Edmondson mentioned that a big problem with the standardized tests that students take now is that they are not necessarily valid, that is that they don’t necessarily test what they are meant to be testing. In a lot of cases the standardized tests end up testing a child’s reading level more than science and math. Amongst other issues, this could be a major problem for students whose first language is not English and this is not taken into account when the test is graded.
Something I learned and found to be shocking is that in some school districts, standardized test scores have become the sole form of teacher assessment. This is really alarming to me. How can a number tell how well a teacher is teaching? The simple answer in my mind is that it in no way demonstrates the quality of a teacher. It does not show how a teacher interacts with his or her students inside the classroom. It does not take into account the resources the teacher may or may not have for their classes. It doesn’t give any information about how the students feel about the teacher and class activities and material. It cannot give any information about how engaged students are in the class. All it is, is a number on a page.
The fact that standardized test scores have, in some instances, become the sole indicator of a teacher’s ability to teach also leads to another problem: Teaching to the test. If a teacher knows that the sole form of evaluation that they will receive is their student’s standardized test scores, then what motivation do they have to teach things that they find to be important but may not be on the test? What motivation do they have to use more creative methods to engage their students and create fun learning activities when those sorts of things wont be on the test?
I look forward to digging deeper into this issue of student and teacher assessment in the coming weeks.