Standardized testing appropriateness for English language learners and young children

¶ … Standardized Assessment Tools: Appropriate for English Language Learners and Young Children?

Standardized assessment tools as measures of academic progress have become the common paradigm for tracking student improvement in classrooms across America. This paper will discuss the concept of standardized testing by viewing the issue through two sets of questions: 1. Is standardized testing appropriate for use with English Language Learners; and 2. Is standardized testing appropriate for use with young children? In conducting this essay, this paper will address the history of standardized testing in America. An overview of what standardized testing encompasses will be offered, as well as a critique of whether or not this particular concept is, prima facie, acceptable and appropriate on its own merits, as well as being an acceptable means test of accountability for the populations of English Language Learners and young children as a whole. A conclusion will be given, in which the main elements of the essay will be summarized. Finally, a comment will be respectfully submitted as to the efficacy of the concept of standardized testing for the demographic groups discussed herein.

History of Standardized Testing in America

Grounded in the foundations of ancient Greek and Chinese education, the concept of standardized testing has early beginnings with Greek "dialogue" in oral question and answer form, and Chinese 7th century written civil service exams. Not new in human history, the idea of testing as means of measurement crossed cultures and milieus. The influence of these early beginnings is seen in early America, with testing beginning with teacher Horace Mann in 1845, moving onto pre-1950's multiple choice tests, college entrance exams including the SAT in 1926, and following the Sputnik launch, public schools in the United States were required to have standardized testing to measure if children were "measuring up" to the Russians. In 1965 the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed, to ensure that public schools receiving federal monies were achieving their goals. In 1969, the National Assessment of Educational Progress was launched, which was to assess the educational progress of Americans as a whole (Black).

Standardized Testing: Appropriate?

A critique of standardized testing is that it forces educators to 'teach to the test', ignoring performance-based measures based on merit. While standardized tests are useful when elucidating a problem, they are less helpful when used to make large decisions for large groups of people. It is especially problematic, when standardized tests are biased against the groups they are meant to measure (Haladyna).

English Language Learners and Standardized Testing

The diversity of America's classrooms makes standardized testing challenging for those students whose first language is not English. Not only do they face the challenge of learning a new language, but also they must learn the normative culture branding that defines the 'how and why' of American school subjects and related measures of progress. Assessment results on this particular population shape educators' attitudes about the skills and abilities of this subset of students, and hence may not capture the reality of all the students know or are capable of. Moreover, this inherent failing in attempting to capture the progress of Early Language Learners may mean that they may not have access to opportunities to higher education, because standardized tests are not measuring the actual knowledge of these students (Lachat).

Conclusion

In this paper, a review and history of standardized testing has been offered. From the concepts early beginnings with the ancient Greeks and Chinese, to proto-testing in early America, and on up to the modern day education system in the United States, we can see that standardized testing has become an acceptable means test of tracking progress of programs in order to measure accountability of students and programs themselves. However, inherent failings in standardized testing are elucidated in two groups: English Language Learners and Young Children. This paper has discussed the problems with administering standardized tests to ELL groups, that being that language and cultural barriers may cause erroneous data to be gathered on this population. In addition, standardized testing for the population of young children has been shown to be problematic due to emotional and developmental immaturities of this group. Moreover, standardized testing of this age group would seem to be centered on adult-centered needs that fail to fully take into account the needs of the children. A final comment posited in this paper, is that standardized testing is an acceptable means test of accountability for tracking progress of some demographic groups, but will fail and underserve those demographic groups that do not fall into the dominant milieu for which the tests were written.