Testing for Intelligence

I hate standardized testing, whether I am on the giving or receiving end, I always feel frustrated. One thing that drives me nuts about it is that while I understand it is supposed to help measure the knowledge learned, in real life, any time you want to know sometime, you can just immediately google it or check it from a textbook or whatever. You don’t have to rely on just your memory…. when you want to know something or forget what something is you check it! Another big con of standardized testing is the effect it has on the children. For some children it doesn’t matter how much they know or how much they study, they are just no good at standardized testing. The pressure and buildup of HAVING to do well and expected to be able to show what their teacher has taught them can be too much. Sometimes what they were taught isn’t on the test and then they don’t know it and it looks bath both on the teacher and the children. It can be a real self-esteem killer and ruin their confidence. It’s easy to interpret a student’s score as the sole judgement of that student’s ability and there can be many cases where students demonstrate clear understanding within a subject or concept through various assessments, but aren’t as skilled at taking multiple choice tests. It can be hard on a student if they feel that they didn’t perform as well as they’d like.

I wish that instead of physical timed testing that there could be a portfolio setup where states could pull from schools to see work or progress over time or possibly just randomly pull test scores from schools and gather information from there. I know that with having a specific timeline and idea of what information could/should be on the tests the teachers are supposed to be helped in this way but “knowing” what to teach their students, however, I think that impacts them negatively even more because the teachers are struggling to put as much information in their children’s heads that less time is being spent on other important values and developmental skills, such as children’s language, personal-social, and what I call the “common sense” skills. Too much emphasis is going into these testing skills, but children aren’t being taught life skills anymore such as learning how to balance a checkbook or do laundry or counting change out for people. While I know that when I was growing up this was because these were skills that were taught by your parents, but with most parents working full time jobs and even longer hours than what they used to, these skills have gone to the wayside and more and more technology has been created that just does things for you that you aren’t LEARNING anymore.

They do this in Finland. There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded (Handcock, 2011). Teachers in Finland also spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. They use the extra time to build their curriculum and assess their students. Homework is minimal and compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. One teacher summed it up best by saying, “We have no hurry. Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide (Handcock, 2011). 

References

Hancock, LynNell (2011, September). “Why are Finlands schools successful?” Retrieved June 15th from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/