Outdated Education Practices Updating Educational

Outdated Education Practices Updating Educational Practices: Standardized Testing The mere mention of "standardized tests" incites strong feelings on both sides of the divide. Proponents argue that such tests provide an objective measure of student achievement and ensure that all children have access to an agreed-upon body of knowledge.

Oswald notes that teachers should be teaching according to state standards, upon which tests are based.The legions who oppose standardized testing argue that such tests do not measure a student's ability to think, and worse, standardized tests do not encourage teachers to engage students in inquiry-based learning but instead force them to "teach to the test." The solution to this dilemma lies somewhere in the middle. All students should have access to equal education and their proficiency must be measured.

It is the task of educators and policymakers to work together to develop better means and methods of testing than currently exist. The mission of public schools has changed since their inception. For over one hundred years, from the last half of the nineteenth century to the 1950s and 1960s, "the dominant project of schools was to impart information and to inculcate habits of work and mind that made widespread and meaningful participation in an industrial age possible" (Friesen, 2010).

The world of work has changed and students must prepare for the workplace in a new way. Standardized testing, therefore, must be adapted to new learning styles in the same way that learning styles had to adapt to the new demands of the marketplace. Steedle, Kugelmass and Nemeth (2010) concluded after their comparisons of three different standardized test instruments that more study was needed to examine the sorts of reasoning students used when formulating responses.

This is certainly a step in the right direction, as it requires students to think about their responses, rather than merely guess, and it provides for teachers an opportunity for understanding how their students arrive at their answers. We may not be able to get away from standardized testing. Buck, Ritter, Jensen and Rose (2010) reviewed policy-oriented education journals over a five-year period and found that articles against testing outnumbered those in favor by a ratio of nine to one.

At the same time, however, they gathered views of educators through focus groups and learned many teachers believe tests provide a roadmap for instruction and yield useful data. Buck et al. also concluded that test prep did not necessarily squelch teachers' creativity. Researchers and teachers both cited the Arkansas State Assessment Test as a positive example of an open-response test that requires creativity in student responses; hence, creativity is needed in the teachers' approach to the material.

Winkler (2002) found that new teachers were more likely than veteran teachers to see advantages to standardized testing. Veteran teachers were frustrated, feeling that standardized testing robbed them of power and freedom. New teachers in the study felt that standardized testing helped foster a climate of collaboration, in which teachers met to discuss pedagogy and methods with an eye toward improving students' performance and mastery. There are dual goals as educators and policymakers review standardized testing.

One is to ensure that tests increasingly provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their thinking processes and allow teachers to.