Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Finals week is almost here. Some students will struggle through studying while others will have no problems at all. But why should that be the case?
The big three learning types are visual, auditory and kinesthetic (learning by doing). The differences are vast, and yet all of these types are evaluated by the same testing style.
“Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB [No Child Left Behind] that are completely free of open-ended questions,” said Thomas Toch, co-director of Education Sector, an independent education think tank.
This means that 50 percent of students are taking tests that jam them into a one-size-fits all, rote memory mold that may not accurately reflect their intelligence.
Gender differences add more complexity. Studies show that women are more hesitant to guess than men and take time to examine a problem from all angles before proceeding, according to FairTest.
Speed-based tests and tests such as the SAT that employ a guessing penalty consistently favor men. Multiple choice questions are also inherently biased toward men. On all other types of questions, such as short answer and essay, the gender gap was virtually non-existent. For a few years women out-performed men in the SAT verbal section, but the test makers added traditionally male topics, such as sports, to “balance” it out.
The bias isn’t only gender-based. On the SAT I, African Americans average 203 points fewer (combined verbal and math) than Caucasian Americans, and Mexican Americans average 157 points fewer than Caucasians.
An analysis of the SAT by Jay Rosner, Princeton Review Foundation executive director, found that “every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks.” He’s quick to note that test developers aren’t trying to be racist — but the results are the same.
Biases aside, do these types of tests even work for the students they target? Toch doesn’t think so.
“The majority of today’s state-level standardized tests are multiple-choice measures of mostly low-level skills,” Toch said. “They largely sidestep higher-level skills and the open-ended questions that are best suited to measuring such skills.”
Regurgitating facts only tests memorization, not the deep understanding of a concept that will actually aid the student in the future.
It’s obvious we need some way to measure student progress, and I’m actually in favor of exit exams. Too many people are let loose unprepared. But if tests are so biased and ineffective, what options do we have?
Standardized tests need a major overhaul. They need more open-ended, deep-thinking questions such as essays and comparisons. Data on cultural and gender differences needs to be incorporated. There needs to be more balance. Individual teachers can toss out those all-multiple-choice tests that are so easy to grade but mean nothing the next year.
After all, I may not have memorized Hamlet’s entire “to be or not to be” speech, but I remember what it taught me about existentialism and the power of choice. If I need to know the specific lines, I’ll look them up.
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