To fully grasp why this is true, there's a lot to know about the arcane underpinnings of standardized tests; however, there is a single principle that summarizes what you need to know:
Never treat a test score as a synonym for what children have learned or what teachers have taught.Again, this too can be true for lots of reasons, but there is a single principle that summarizes what you need to know:
A right answer on a test does not necessarily indicate understanding and a wrong answer does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding.Show me someone who places high stakes on one single test, and I'll show you someone who does not understand how testing is unavoidably incomplete and inherently prone to error.
"A right answer on a test does not necessarily indicate understanding and a wrong answer does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding."
ReplyDeleteI agree with this statement. I recently had to take a standardized test at the unemployment office. I was doing pretty well until the test started asking what I thought were higher level thinking questions. I looked at the question thought about all of the possible answers. Considered the deeper things that the text I read was trying to say, and picked what I still think was the best answer. I was wrong because the "correct" answer was directly out of the text and you were not supposed to infer anything. I felt like it was not really testing my reading capabilities and how well I could think about what I read, but how well I can look at what I read to find the answer to the test.
At school we had to do a multiple-choice test for reading and listening for the foreign language(s) we were learning. A boy in my French class was renowned for being pretty lazy at school, and sure enough, after the test, he told me that he just shaded random bubbles- some Cs to go with the "just pick C" mentality, some As, some Bs and a few Ds here and there. Another boy copied off him and got a Distinction. The look on everyone's face was priceless.
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