Welcome to Kindergarten. Take This Test. And This One.
One of the first times New Orleans kindergarten teacher Molly Mansel gave her class a computer-based standardized test last fall, the 30 5-year-olds didn’t know how to take it. The children, raised in the era of the mighty touchscreen, were instructed to use a computer mouse to take the test. Instead, they kept trying to swipe the laptop screens like they were iPhones.
Recent research out of the University of Virginia shows that contemporary kindergarten teachers spend much more time teaching academic skills—skills that are often tested—than they did 15 years ago. And they spend significantly less time on dramatic play and art. A look inside Mansel’s classroom at Sylvanie Williams Elementary School offers a view of what these changes actually look like on the ground.
Mansel’s students started taking tests just three weeks into the 2014–15 school year. They began with a state-required early childhood exam in August, which covered everything from basic math to letter identification. Mansel estimates that it took between four and five weeks for the teachers to test all 58 kindergarten students—and that was with the help of the prekindergarten team. The test requires an adult to sit individually with each student, reading questions and asking them to perform various tasks. The test is 11 pages long and “it’s very time-consuming,” according to Mansel, who is 24 and in her third year of teaching (her first in kindergarten).
The rest of the demanding testing schedule involves repeated administrations of two different school-mandated tests. The first, Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, is used to measure how students are doing compared with their peers nationally—and to evaluate teachers’ performance. The students take the test in both reading and math three times a year. They have about an hour to complete the test, and slower test takers are pulled from class to finish.
The second test, called Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress, or STEP, is a literacy assessment that measures and ranks children’s progress as they learn letters, words, sentences, and, eventually, how to read. Mansel gives the test individually to students four times throughout the year. It takes several days to administer as Mansel progresses through a series of tasks: asking the students to write their names, to point to uppercase and lowercase versions of letters, and to identify words thatKindergarten has changed: Less time for play, more time for standardized tests.: