Standardized testing creates ineffective learning environment
A few years ago, my father picked up a guitar and decided that he was going to learn how to play it. Books, DVDs and magazines cluttered his office as he devoted himself to all things guitar-related, and soon the random strumming began to sound a little more like music. Although he’s no Carlos Santana or Eric Clapton, he still managed to teach himself a skill that he takes pride in. Can you recall a similar experience in your own life, a time when you actively sought to learn something and succeeded? If it happened in school, you should feel lucky; true learning is an endangered species in public schools across the nation.
What made learning the guitar so special for my father? Was it the rigid schedule that required him to practice for 35 minutes every morning? Or the twice-weekly quiz that ensured us that he was ready to move on to something more advanced? He probably got the most satisfaction out of the high-stakes performance at the House of Blues, in which a jury of strangers decided whether he had learned enough to continue playing or if he would need to go back and start from scratch.
Of course, I’m being facetious. No one chose the guitar for my father. He did. He was motivated from within from the beginning, and if I had pressured him too soon to go beyond his capabilities, I could have easily crushed his desire to play. My family helped facilitate his learning by finding new instructional materials for him to explore, but we never required him to only play country western. He paced himself, and he knew when he needed more time to practice a chord or revisit a song.
Teachers aren’t encouraged to create this environment in their classroom very often. Our educational system is dominated by a term commonly thrown out by politicians and CEOs: standardized testing. Test everyone on the same subjects with the same questions, regardless of the individual differences in each child, as early and as often as the calendar permits.
Students cannot truly learn in an environment like this; they lack that internal motivation, and there is no time for practice or mastery. Noted psychologist Howard Gardner once said the greatest enemy to understanding is coverage. Creating a long list of topics that have to be learned by the end of the school year is dangerous; it sets a clock on the teacher already struggling to make up for what their student missed out on in the previous grade.
You can’t blame a single person for this ineffective learning environment. Our collective dependence on test scores as the only proof that students are learning causes us to only focus on preparing for that test. Freed from this pressure, teachers can instead teach skills like critical thinking, composition, scientific observation and mathematics. Some might argue that these abilities are difficult to assess; in reality, they’re just impossible to put on a standardized test. To master them takes the kind of time and practice found in learning a lifelong skill, like playing the guitar.
(Originally published in the Zanesville Times Recorder, July 25, 2010.)
