What Do the Tests Test?
What Do the Tests Test?
by Alan Singer
My eight-year-old grandchildren, Sadia and Gideon, seem to have survived the third grade ELA and Math tests without being scarred for life. From their perspective, it was “Much Ado About Nothing,” and they were more concerned about the start of the little league baseball season in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
For me, the bigger questions remain the value of these tests in the education of children, especially the impact they have on what gets taught (curriculum), how it is taught (pedagogy), and how learning is accurately measured (assessment).
What do these high stakes standardized tests actually test?
Based on his study of student performance on standardized tests from 1960 to 2010, Sean Reardon, in a recent essay in The New York Times, reports that “Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores.” The gap continues to rise, and according to Reardon, family income is a better predictor of student performance on these tests than any other factor. It appears that all the high stakes standardized tests measure is the socio-economic status and earnings of parents and not how much students know or how well they will perform in school.
Rather than waste all this time and money on testing, an alternative is to just throw out the standardized tests
