Courtesy of: Granada Hills Charter
Students learn about polynomials in Janie Dam’s Algebra 2 class.
Courtesy of: Granada Hills Charter
Students learn about polynomials in Janie Dam’s Algebra 2 class.
Janie Dam
November 22, 2022
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Student overtesting has increasingly become one of the political battlegrounds of our public school system.
It was listed as one of five concerns listed on the United Teachers of Los Angeles’ Beyond the recovery platform. However, as reported EdSource Recently, we have a better understanding of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the academic path of students thanks to California Smarter Balanced and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the results of standardized tests. The alarming declines in performance in maths and English reinforce the importance of having objective data on students to clearly identify learning gaps that need to be addressed.
Standardized tests have been with us for thousands of years. The first recorded event can be found in the ancient selection of officials, as early as 2200 BC. Contestants were given three arrows for shooting a human-sized and shaped object while riding a horse. If all three arrows hit the target, a perfect score was won; two reaching the goal were classified as good; and if a single arrow hit the target, it was a pass.
In the last century, standardized testing in the United States came in the form of multiple-choice exams and multi-hour essays, which could be just as strenuous (and with acceptance at university based primarily on scores, perhaps just as awful). We have now come to recognize that these high-stakes assessments have fundamental flaws: gender, wealth, and racial biases and the subversion of results through expensive prep courses that do not level the playing field; even funded by parents Cheating.
Newcomers to the country tend to start conversing in English before learning to write in the language, but most standardized tests don’t come in the form of voice response, except for the language exams themselves. same. The failure to provide equitable access to high school students with special needs during the pandemic led to lawsuits and accelerated a movement away from the College Board exam that was clearly coming and in many cases clearly needed. . Many colleges and universities, including the University of California system, drop both the SAT and ACT as admission requirements.
But this evolution leaves us with some unavoidable questions: What does data collection hold for us to track states’ and countries’ progress toward a better educated workforce? Should all standardized tests be discarded in the fight against unhealthy overtesting and high-stakes pitfalls we’ve come to understand? There are projections of a shortage in America of millions of highly educated and skilled workers, and global economic competition is expected to continue to steadily increase. It would be foolish to deprive ourselves of a coherent way of evaluating how our education system is serving our young people – and by extension all of us.
The answer to student overtesting is not to throw out all standardized tests, but rather to streamline and improve the assessment process.
The on-site Smarter Balanced (or equivalent) should be able to stand alone as an instrument to meaningfully measure both higher education capacity and future employability, whether through college attendance or vocational training . This action also serves to eliminate ancillary exam fees for students and parents who cannot afford them, thus reducing the gap between families who have and those who have not. Transportation and access would be much less of an obstacle when the testing site is the school site and testing is done during school hours.
Fortunately, advanced educational technologies such as class robots can now make standardized assessments more feasible for homeschooled teachers and parents. In addition to data-driven machine learning that leads to greater precision and accuracy, artificial intelligence is not overwhelmed by emotions. Interactive assistive technologies have unlimited patience because they don’t experience frustration like human teachers and parents, such as when children don’t listen or understand, and may need the same instructions to be repeated multiple times. ; or when scoring becomes too cumbersome and time-consuming.
Machines can be coded not score based on gender, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, spoken accent, etc. of the candidate. They can be designed to speak and understand several world languages, display visuals and glossaries, convert from text to speech and vice versa.
But the most important key here is to design questions and test formats as part of a multicultural education that celebrates diversity, whether for use on a school campus or at home. The aim should be to expand banks of test items and to establish differentiated and equitable scoring protocols for assessing performance, both of which appropriately reflect the student’s cultural and linguistic background. And that too is more feasible with the help of artificial intelligence. Indeed, such personalization will pave the way for every child to benefit from an individualized education program, not just children identified for special education.
Not that anyone wants or wants TikTok to dictate their future, but before you scoff, think about it like this: if TikTok can accurately predict what images, songs, videos you’ll like the most, why algorithms similar to those that power TikTok can potentially be used to predict which work tasks and therefore jobs you might enjoy the most and be most motivated to excel at, then suggest, but let you decide, to select a corresponding study program.
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Janie Dam, is a math teacher and, for 13 years, school-wide testing and data coordinator at Granada Hills Charter in Los Angeles. She has been a professional educator since 2000 and is a member of United Teachers of Los Angeles.
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