Essays

Stop Standardized Testing

According to Lehigh University of education, In 1845, A man named Horace Mann convinced the members of the board of education, located in Boston, to create written exams for the students in Boston to view and engage in a student's knowledge they learned during the school year. Due to seeing the effectiveness for the use of these testing other states decided to implement the testing. What no one had predicted during the time was how teachers were being ridiculed about their ability to teach the students which in turn caused a riot. The teachers claimed that on the exams the questions on the tests were questions a student would not have any knowledge on or were taught which would lead a student to fail the question causing teachers to be fired from their jobs and causing the board members to step down from their positions. Nowadays they are now called standardized testing.

Parents, students and teachers believe getting rid of standardized testing would be more beneficial due to the negative impact of a student's mental health while also changing one's learning and knowledge of the concepts they, the students, learned in the school throughout the years.

Although standardized testing has helped determine the funds a school is eligible to receive to help continue for the next school year, many student's health during the important tests were never taken into consideration since board members, political icons and faculty of the school believe a student does not understand what they truly desire. Parents, teachers and students feel the pressure from standardized testing, In "Some Families Feel Pressure To Take STAAR,No Matter What" written by Eva-Marie Ayala; Parents talk about how much they would receive phone calls from the school begging and harassing them to let their child(ren) take the test knowing that a student is sick or the parents opting them out from testing with the school stating as long as the student can move, see and hear they were able to take the test.

As much as students and parents fear standardized testing, so do teachers as well. Cognitive fatigue, stated in "Teachers cognitive fatigue from state of Texas assessment of academic readiness standardized testing practices" by Abram Estrada, is when a person becomes anxious, tired, annoyed, over thinks, loses focus and have problems sleeping due to causing one to have insomnia. Without proper sleep a student's health can deteriorate and with causing lost focus, students will have a greater chance of failing the testing which they have studied for months and can cause a student to either having to retake the test or opting for summer school.

With the United States having required testing about everything a student has learned from kindergarten all the way up to adulthood it becomes exhausting for those who have to take them. It is even worse for Asia due to their tests determining the type of school they are able to attend and how many people will stay up for days at a time studying and losing sleep. "Parents resistance to standardized testing in a highly centralized system: The emergence of an opt-out movement in Israel" by Nov Sabag and Feniger Yariv talks about how in Israel their testing is very similar to the US, however they use the testing results as a growth chart for the students to help determine their classes for the next year and year after that. The parents/ guardians of these students are fighting to have the test obliterated because of how much their children do not sleep and will not sleep until the very next day. Children alone need around 9 hours of sleep to function and learn while adults need around 6 or so hours of sleep to function in life.

Mental health has been the main point of why standardized testing needs to be stopped, however in "The abuse of standardized testing" by Vito Perrone, if standardized testing were to continue and changed the grade of when you start it will create a whole generation of children who are anxious, depressed and angry which in turn can have students dropout of school causing the children to lead to suicide because of the humiliation a student could potentially face if they were to fail or if they are sick and tired of the testing creating the idea that they are screw-ups causing more harm than good.

Even though standardized testing does not sound as bad as many people believe it to be, they will never understand the mental and physical deterioration it has on those who have taken them; An example of this would have to be myself. I first started taking standardized testing when I was in 3rd grade because in Texas people take a test called State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR for short from 3rd grade all the way up to junior year of high school. When I first started taking the exams I was terrified because of how much it will affect my classes for the next year and because I did not want to let anyone down causing me to have test anxiety. When I and my other classmates at the time received our scores I wanted to crawl into a hole and not come out. A classmate of mine whispered to me that a whole class with a new teacher failed the entirely of it. It was difficult after that to continue school knowing many people my age might have had to stay in the same grade again for the year. Till this day I never knew what became of that class.

Standardized testing will unfortunately still be around to help school funding and receiving the scores of students, although in the study "The deadly effect of high stakes testing on teenagers with reference dependent preferences" by Liang Choon Wang from Monash University, it was claimed that college students alone who take high or standardized testing and failed felt scared and guilty about their scores which in turn caused many suicide attempts. Approximately 24,000 were attempted., Of those 24,000 only 1,100 ended up succeeding. That alone is 4.6% of college students alone. The number of Middle school and elementary students are still being studied, however 4.6% is already too big of a number for our society. Over time it will double or triple if we do not look into getting rid of standardized testing or even changing the way society handles testing, we will lose generation after generation of students if the change is not done.