How are your children holding up during standardized testing?
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Worry, anxiety, fear. With so much now riding on standardized testing, some students are picking up on the emotions of the grownups around them and approaching this year's standardized testing with a variety of emotions.
Parents, teachers: Share your stories here about how your children have reacted to the testing, and what you have done to address their concerns.
QUESTION
Respond
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Why not just ask us directly?
I am 14, and am currently in the Eye of the Storm, between the ELAs and Math tests.
Feeling? "Flying Blind". With the pineapple question, and Pearson sneaking Field Test questions onto the real test(Wow, NY, it only took you several years do realize we don't care about Field Tests). It would also be nice if adults would tell us if state test performance even affected us other than driving down our parents' property values.
How about "Defensive"? Parents love comparing how well we do this year to last year, forgetting that this year Pearson was contracted(cough*millionsoftaxpayerdollars*cough) to change the tests and recycle junk from other states, er, make them more difficult. C'mon people, remember what you learned in science class(Perhaps why they don't give state science tests each year?). You have to keep all but one variable constant, or your findings are about as valid as what the hobo down the street in the tinfoil hat spouts. Even if you don't mind the terrible job Pearson does, you still have to remember the noise that skews scores. Something as small as opening the curtains means the difference between an A and a C-.(http://architecture.mit.edu/h...)
Perhaps "Exhausted". The tests this year are the biggest yet. They tagged on two reading passages and fifteen comprehension questions on the LISTENING part of the ELA. Maybe Pearson thinks Albany will pay them more if they make a longer test...
How about "Defensive"? Parents love comparing how well we do this year to last year, forgetting that this year Pearson was contracted(cough*millionsoftaxpayerdollars*cough) to change the tests and recycle junk from other states, er, make them more difficult. C'mon people, remember what you learned in science class(Perhaps why they don't give state science tests each year?). You have to keep all but one variable constant, or your findings are about as valid as what the hobo down the street in the tinfoil hat spouts. Even if you don't mind the terrible job Pearson does, you still have to remember the noise that skews scores. Something as small as opening the curtains means the difference between an A and a C-.(http://architecture.mit.edu/h...)
Perhaps "Exhausted". The tests this year are the biggest yet. They tagged on two reading passages and fifteen comprehension questions on the LISTENING part of the ELA. Maybe Pearson thinks Albany will pay them more if they make a longer test...
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Elementary students: 3 days in a row. 90 minutes each day in a silent sanitized room. What does our commissioner robot and his evil overlord controllers want for the future of middle-class and below students (because their wealthy backers and private school dandies will never have to worry about "standards" and state tests)? Are we being mandated to train cubicle monkeys and service sector minimum wage workers? Real critical thinkers would pose a threat to the "reform" movement because so much of it is clearly wrong-morally and educationally.
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The pressure of test taking needs to be removed. Daily quizzes are the best measurements for success or failure (just as in real life). Tests should be designed as learning devices. All questions and solutions should be available to the public. It is a total waste of time if the test is not used as a teaching tool. The education business is supposed to be about teaching and learning, not a contest with winners and losers. The only test that should be secret is the SAT/ACT and it should be sort of like an IQ test with no feasible way to prepare for it other than doing your best day to day in school and through an understanding of the questions and solutions in the public question pool.
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Get rid of these meaningless tests, close all the government schools, and home school your kids. They will grow up healthy,happy, and successful. A childhood spent in a school is a very sad childhood indeed. I want to cry everytime I see school children in the morning dragged of to school by their parents. I guess people are actully brainwashed into believing that school is good for them. Time to wake up and give these children back their childhoods.Forced schooling is abusive toward children and should be outlawed.
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I work with third graders. Two stopped and stared in a dead-panic for at least twenty minutes, hearts racing, freaking out over questions they weren't sure about.
One spent 45 minutes trying to read, then stopping, then trying to read again, only to tell me, "I can't do it. I can't do it. I don't deserve to go to 4th grade anyway."
After the test, many kids rushed to ask me what would happen if they got a 2 on this test, but a 4 on the math, or any other combination of scores. They said, again and again, how worried they were, and how they didn't want to fail. They didn't want to have to repeat the grade.
I remember feeling maybe 1/4 of this stress and panic when I had to take the SAT when I was 17. These kids are 7 and feel the weight of the rest of their lives on their shoulders while they take these tests.
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I have two kids taking the ELA's: a fifth grader who thinks he is an old hand at it, and a third grader who is very nervous that she will have to redo third grade. while neither of them will confess to any anxiety or discomfort with the testing itself, their personalities have become very brittle and insecure this month and their usual boisterousness very dampened.
1 comment:
Hi Betsy, I just want to inform you that a 3020-a decision rendered by Arbitrator Javits discharging a teacher has been reversed, in the following case:
Matter of Haas v New York City Bd./Dept. of Educ.
2012 NY Slip Op 30863(U)
April 4, 2012
Sup Ct, NY County
Docket Number: 110190/11
Judge: Carol R. Edmead
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