Millions of kids take standardized tests simply to help testing companies make better tests. (Really.)
Millions of U.S. students take standardized tests every year with the sole goal of helping testing companies make better tests.
They are called “field tests,” and students take them at different times of year — often in spring and early summer — to test questions so that companies can determine whether they are constructed well enough to use on future exams. New York is completing its field tests this week.
Kids don’t get a grade but take them anyway, sometimes without their parents’ knowledge.
(If this sounds to you as though students are being used as guinea pigs for testing companies, well . . .)
School systems and testing companies say field tests are a vital part of writing new and valid exams and that including students is necessary. Critics have questioned their usefulness. (Questions used for the same purpose also appear on standardized tests that really do count. But students aren’t told which ones.)
Concerns about the validity of questions on high-stakes standardized tests have dogged testing companies for years, prompting critics to ask whether field tests work as well as they should. Complaints about the wording or usefulness of questions mar just about every testing cycle — and have for years.
In 2013, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published results of a year-long investigation into standardized testing and found big flaws with standardized tests in more than 40 states. In one, West Virginia, about 45 percent of the exams given over a two-year period were “thick with potentially poor questions,” it said.
What kind of flaws? The newspaper cited one, on a sixth-grade social studies test given in Georgia, in which CONTINUE READING: Millions of kids take standardized tests simply to help testing companies make better tests. (Really.) - The Washington Post
