According to Psychology Today, teaching to the test directly translates to a curriculum heavily focused on preparing students for a standardized test. Teachers around the nation are beginning to feel the stress of teaching to the test. For instance, Stephanie Overman states that “legislation like NCLB has raised the stakes for testing, potentially tying student performance to teacher salaries and job stability, and dictating what teachers teach.” Teachers are ultimately held accountable for their classroom’s test scores, so there really is no choice on teaching to the test; it is inevitable. Craig Jerald says, “item teaching is reprehensible, it should be stopped.” But how is it possible to stop? If teachers are being judged based off of test scores, how can we change that? What kind of teachers are we if we teach kids to test instead of teaching them to think; instead of teaching them to be productive members of society?
When a young child enters school, the majority of their life is spent in a school environment. The people that surround them most are their teachers and their peers. I personally feel as though part of an educators job is to shape children into adults. Teachers are role models to kids, they set examples; so why would we teach a child to take a test? Teaching to the test has many flaws in my opinion. Standardized tests do not show the progress of a student as well as we might think they do. For example, a student might be excelling in school with good grades, but they might be a terrible test taker. How can we let one standardized test judge a student’s mind? How can teachers teach the kid to pass a test that won’t correctly reflect their learning? I don’t think teaching to the test benefits the students in the way that education should. They are being taught to pass a test rather than to think. They are memorizing methods for testing rather than stepping out of their comfort zone.
In the future, how exactly will teaching to the test affect the children? How far will they be able to go in life while lacking the basic skills of thinking? Their entire educational experience has been founded off of being able to memorize. They are taught to predict exactly what will be on the test and exactly how to solve the same problem over and over again. What they learn in class is based off of what they need to know to pass the test. So what happens when something is on the test that they weren’t told to memorize? What happens after school when a student is required to think rather than memorize?
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