High-stake testing is defined by Berliner (24) as the utilization of a summative assessment or test to make decisions that are of significant impact on education, finance, and society. However, there are risks that are associated with this kind of testing to students, teachers, and the school system. This form of testing requires students to take a single comprehensive test that can be used to evaluate the whole learning process. Even though increased test scores are commonly viewed as positive, critics of high-stake testing take a different rationale.
High stakes testing was established with the aim of improving the education systems. The focus of the testing was to bridge the gap and give children of all social and economic backgrounds equal access to high-quality education. The tests are not new in the education systems as they have been conducted over the last several years to test students in grades 3-8 and in high schools. High-stakes testing was meant to gauge the student's mastery, measure the school's improvement as well as determine the schools’ progress in terms of achievement (Zimmerman and Maria 1). However, they have affected educators and students in all learning institutions across the entire United States.
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High-stakes testing involves a standardized test in which results are utilized as the main determining factor that can be used for decision making for both students and schools. In most cases, these tests are issued to determine the school progress regardless of whether a student will graduate or not while also determining the continued school's accreditation. The mandates of the high-stake testing were compiled under the No Child Left Behind Act . High-stakes testing, however, is detrimental to the public school systems due to the resultant stressful environment that it poses upon the students, increased rates of dropouts as well as inadequate curriculum mastery. It is remarkably controversial and it is criticized by numerous educators and parents in the U.S. As much as there are people that criticize it, there are those that support the high-stake testing. This paper, therefore, seeks to discuss high-stakes testing while informing educators and people about the impact of high-stakes testing on learning.
Background of High-stake Testing
The introduction of high-stake testing in schools took place in 2002 when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in the U.S. Many schools adopted the high-stake testing because they thought they could improve the education system. The act required students to pass standardized tests to move to another grade level or graduate from high school. The act also determined the progress of teachers and schools as well as had the ability to deny accreditation of schools. The act was also developed to minimize achievement gap of students between different socio-economic classes to enable students achieve predetermined standards in mathematics and reading. To determine whether students were meeting the set standard, the Act developed standardized tests to ensure equity between various students’ groups and school districts. The act also required the tests result to be monitored and reported so as to enhance the performance of schools and further reward those that were performing well.
Over the past years, various states have implemented standardized testing to determine students’ achievements. However, the questions that still remain unanswered are whether high-stakes testing is effective or what consequences do high-stake testing pose to students, teachers, and school systems. Students that succeed throughout the year may suffer consequences when they do poorly on standardized tests. They may be forced to attend an enrichment program or denied access to a specialty program in public schools. On the other hand, if the school performs poorly on standardized tests, the backlash has devastating effects on students, teachers, and the entire school. The reactions of poor performance can plague the school through shame, loss of pride, and embarrassment. These reactions will be opposite to the school that has performed well.
Impacts of High Stakes Testing in Learning
The high standardized testing adversely affects the quality of education offered in schools. The children are subjected to a relatively high number of tests that only push them to attain high scores rather than improve their competency (Haney & Wheelock 15). Due to high stakes testing, the students spend most of their time preparing for tests rather than studying, and hence at the end of the day, the major concern is passing the exams and tests rather than understanding what they learn in class. The teachers and the schools, on the other hand, are forced to adjust their curriculum and devote some of the valuable time meant for learning to prepare and mark tests that students do time after time. Since the students concentrate mostly on passing the exams and their teachers are similarly focused upon setting the tests and marking them, the quality of education is thereby compromised to a great extent.
Curriculum mastery has been compromised with high-stakes testing implementation in the education systems (Zimmerman and Maria 1). All the time that is spent setting, taking, and marking of tests indicates that teachers are more focused on teaching subjects that are tested and leave out those that are not evaluated. Since subjects such as music, arts, science, social studies, and physical education are not tested, schools and teachers devote less or no time in teaching them in classrooms. Some schools even go ahead to scrap off some of the subjects that are not tested so as to allocate more time to those that will be tested. Additionally, teachers are always given a set curriculum that, in many cases, does not allow students to have a deep analysis of the subject matter, perform critical thinking or even engage themselves in looking into further relevant study materials.
As opined by Jones (69), high-stake testing encourages teachers and educators to adhere on teaching to the test. By teaching to the test, the scores of the students improve but do not reflect real learning in the class environment. When an educator is teaching to the test, the content is memorized by the students and not effectively learned. These similar measurable student performance levels can also be represented through low-stakes testing if the teacher fails to ‘teach to the test’. As much as ‘teaching to the test’ gains increasing scores, it does not take into account the learning styles of students, demographics, the teaching styles of teachers as well as the score levels for purposes of accountability.
According to the annual increase in scores, teaching to the test finds high-stake testing less accurate as compared to other forms of measuring student performance. High-stake testing has resulted in the hindmost form of teaching to the test that remains unethical. The scores attained from high-stake testing misrepresent what the students have actually learned about the tested content. Students that are taught to take the test will do well on what they have been taught on the test because drilled fundamentals have already developed in the student’s brain. Teaching to the test is pressuring teachers and educators and most schools are losing potential teachers because of these pressures. High-stake testing limit teachers to establish a productive student-teacher relationship because most of them feel a whiplash when rewriting the curriculum. Likewise, administrators and teachers feel that the No Child Left behind Act (NCLB) has narrowed the curriculum because a significant amount of teachers’ test preparation times rather than students how to utilize critical thinking skills.
High stakes testing exposes students and learners to a stressful environment. The time of preparing and taking tests is always associated with high levels of anxiety in the learners (Ritt 1). Test anxiety is a common thing that is associated with standardized tests. As much as these rates of test anxiety vary widely among students, extensive studies have proved that students are experiencing anxiety because of high-stake testing (Haney & Wheelock, 36). Test anxiety makes the students perform way below their potential. Additionally, the tests do not accurately measure the abilities of a student as in most cases, as they do not test what was taught in school entirely. At times the standardized tests include materials that were not taught at a student's level, and hence when he or she does the test and fails, he is subjected to unreasonable stress of thinking that others are better than him or her. Some children learn better through hands-on skills, while others learn better through word of mouth. Testing these two groups of people in a standard way will create a segregation situation where those who pass are considered as high performers, while those who fail are recognized as underperforming ones, and this, in many cases, instills stress in the learners.
In most cases, students are not aware of how these high-stake testing works but they only understand the pressure and stress they face from their educators. Since the introduction of the Act, test anxiety is experienced in students more than ever making others to even develop physiological problems. The pressure and anxiety faced by every student and teacher has made teachers to lose the love for teaching and they are not developing anymore love for learning. This problem should be recognized by teachers so that they can bridge that gap by teaching students how to work solve problems, work in teams and stop thinking about tests.
High rates of school dropouts are associated with high-stake testing implementation in learning institutions (Shriberg et al. 78). When a child is seen as a failure, there is a tendency of him or her to drop out of school. A high rate of school dropouts of bilingual children, special needs students as well as those from the poor backgrounds is closely associated with the standardized tests that are conducted in schools. There is a disparity in terms of power and the privileges that various children have. Children from poor backgrounds, for instance, do not have access to facilities that would foster and promote their learning as opposed to their affluent counterparts. Failure due to factors that one has no control over is known to be one of the major reasons as to why students drop out of schools.
Additionally, high-stake testing has resulted in the loss of creativity in the curriculum. Due to high-stakes testing, teachers have started to concentrate on subjects that can be easily measured on standardized tests because testing gives teachers minimal space to teach students creatively in their classrooms. Teachers are not giving students various alternatives to get answers but instead direct them to refer in their textbooks to get correct answers. Although there is only one right answer, students are denied significant learning tools that enable them become creative thinkers. According to Berliner (297), about 44 percent of school districts have started to reduce the time spend on arts, social sciences, and social studies to concentrate more on mathematics and reading and. This study, therefore, suggests that high-stake testing has progressively eliminated the need for the curriculum within the classrooms that always made school an engaging experience.
Even though high-stakes testing has numerous negative impacts on learning, it also has various positive impacts that are associated with measuring learning. Firstly, high-stake testing assesses the progress of both schools and students to benefit students. The tests were developed to offer details of content areas where educators and teachers are needed to concentrate on the needs of students by effectively teaching them in the classroom. Secondly, high-stake testing measures the ability of the student to take the test as well as test-taking skills that are not taught in the classroom. Instead of an objective test where educators judge students based on knowledge and retention by essay, high-stake testing is standardized in a multiple-choice format with specific answers. The results are then analyzed then used for student diagnosis. The diagnosis can be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of students, educators, and curriculum. The outcomes of high-stake testing are also used to develop teaching plans based on the needs of the student that help in improving the academic success of students in the long run. If it is discovered that neither the curriculum nor the teacher covered that specific area of concern, the curriculum may be modified therefore identifying problems that are caused by cultural or language differences.
Apart from developing teaching plans, the test results that come from high-stake testing are used as a tool to improve the progress of students. Parents can access the results of their children and work cooperatively with teachers to improve the strategies and skills needed to successfully complete high-stake tests. As much as most critics view it as discriminatory, at some extend it is non-discriminatory because the high-stake tests provided to students are standardized before being administered to all students at their respective grade level. In this case, it enables students to receive the same test irrespective of their ethnicity, language, or culture.
Conclusively, high-stake testing is one of the most controversial issues around the United States. This has resulted because of the numerous advocates for and against the use of this testing. Advocates for high-stake testing argue that high-stake testing helps the government to assess the progress of students and teachers, measure the test-taking skills of the student, and developing teaching plans. While it is necessary to test students at different levels of learning so as to gauge their competence and comprehension, the high-stake testing strategy does more harm than good. From compromising curriculum mastery to leading to a high number of school dropouts, the testing strategy is slowly ruining the learning systems. Apart from ruining the learning systems, high-stake testing has also lost creativity in the curriculum. The test has also developed a learning environment that marginalizes students on issues that are out of control hindering student-teacher relationships. The student-teacher relationships are hindered when teachers pay most of their attention on students that pass standardized tests and ignore those that are struggling academically.
Therefore, there is a need to consider other factors such as socio-economic and special needs when setting the tests rather than standardizing them across all the learning institutions. Testing should be based more on competencies and abilities in all subjects rather than on some selected few so as to ensure full mastery of the curriculum that would result in an all-round student.
Works Cited
Berliner, David. "Rational responses to high stakes testing: The case of curriculum narrowing and the harm that follows." Cambridge Journal of Education 41.3 (2011): 287-302.
Wheelock, A., W. Haney, and D. Bebell. "What can student drawings tell us about high-stakes testing in Massachusetts? TCRecord. org." (2011). https://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=10634
Jones, Brett D. "The unintended outcomes of high-stakes testing." Journal of applied school psychology 23.2 (2007): 65-86.
Ritt, Maddolyn. "The impact of high-stakes testing on the learning environment." (2016).https://sophia.stkate.edu/msw_papers/658
Shriberg, David, and Amy Burke Shriberg. "High-Stakes Testing and Dropout
Rates". Dissent, vol 53, no. 4, 2006, pp. 76-80. Project Muse,
doi:10.1353/dss.2006.0040.
Zimmerman, Barry J., and Maria K. Dibenedetto. "Mastery learning and assessment: Implications for students and teachers in an era of high ‐ stakes testing." Psychology in the Schools 45.3 (2008): 206-216. snhu.edu. https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=9b6bdabd-099f-463c-92cf-7f61f4fac592%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=31135947&db=asn
