More Testing, More Learning By Patrick O Malley

Students dread the time of the year when they stop with their course material and begin to prepare for test. Everyone is in agreement that some type of revolution is needed when it comes to education; eliminating standardized test will aid the reform. The need for standardized testing has proven to be ineffective and outdated; some leading educationalist also believe this because the tests do not measure a student’s true potential. This will save money, stop labeling, and alleviate stress in students and teachers.

One of the main controversial disputes regarding education is if test taking is actually a beneficial form of a learning technique for students. Within the context of Henry L. Roediger III’s article, How Tests Make Us Smarter, Roediger goes into depth upon how giving students “low-stakes quizzes” could help improve their memory as well as consistent and spread out practice. Psychology In Action, written by both Karen Huffman and Katherine Dowdell, also restates similar learning techniques within their first chapter.

According to Patrick O'Malley's "More Testing, More Learning", the problem is that professors normally give less frequent exams that are counted the most against a student's grade. One of the effects he mentioned was that less frequent exams causes unnecessary amounts of stress on the student. Another one of the effects is that they don't encourage frequent study as well as fails to inspire students' best performance. O'Malley suggests that professors should give more frequent short exams to students. However, there are some objections to this suggestion. One is that such exams take up too much limited class time available to cover material in the course. Another objection is that short exams take too much time for professors to read and

The article “More Testing More Learning,” by Patrick O’Malley, discusses that students get anxious about a big test and how more frequent test can reduce that. More tests help decrease anxiety by forcing students to study more often, therefore, they learn the material. Professors, however, don’t always like to give more quizzes because essay questions take a long time to grade. O’Malley eliminates that excuse with providing some solutions as well as a few alternative quiz question styles.

Similarly, the study by McDermott et al. (2014) had the purpose of examining if testing had an impact later performance on exams. Experiment 1a had 141 participants who were in the seventh-grade public school students from a middle-class suburban town located in the Midwest. The study had three learning conditions: multiple-choice quiz, short-answer quiz, or no quiz at all prior to exam. Three tests were initially administered to all participants, a pre-lesson quiz, a post-lesson quiz, and a review quiz a day before the unit exam. The multiple-choice group completed quizzes that had a choice of four different answers and had 30 seconds to complete each question. After choosing an answer, the computer would inform them if they were correct or incorrect to provide feedback. The short-answer group was provided questions at the front of the room, and would write down the answer to the question on a piece of paper within 75 seconds per question. Answers to the questions would be provided for the entire group by the researcher. Exams were completed by all

Thoughts can be fleeting, however some of the feelings resulting from thought and can have a long lasting impact on the mental state of a person. In my metacognitive exploration I found an interesting comparison between the way in which I think and approach my past feelings and the methods which Tim O’Brien, from The Things They Carried, and Paul D from Beloved express their thinking about the past. I have discovered that the expression of thoughts, including memories and feelings, is the key to a healthy mental state of a person.

“…only twenty-two percent of those surveyed said increased testing had helped the performance of their local schools compared with twenty-eight in 2007” (“Public Skeptical of Standardized Testing.”). Furthermore the poll indicated an eleven percent increase, compared to last year, towards the favor of discontinuing the usage of students’ test results for teacher evaluations. William Bushaw, executive director of PDK International and co-director of PDK/Gallup Poll also stated, “Americans’ mistrust of standardized tests and their lack of confidence and understanding around new education standards is one the most surprising developments we’ve found in years” (“Public Skeptical of Standardized Testing.”). All in all, not only are these tests a concern for students, who are forced to sit through them, hoping to get a decent enough score to place into a class, receive their diploma, or even get accepted to the college of their dreams, but they are a concern for parents as well, who only want the best for their children and to see them succeed.

“High school grades reflect years of effort and are more reliable assessment of college potential than test scores.” Historians detected that standardized testing started back in the seventh-century in China. The government of China began to organize written exams to select people for the civil service. Also many educators try to make sure that they are following the right requirements but some of them don’t and do all sorts of stuff with the results. Many individuals would say that standardized testing is a helpful way of learning from what the student knows and doesn’t, but the consequences that teachers found out of the standardized tests are making the students have a decrease in critical thinking.

On the other hand, OCadiz (2013) argues that standardize testing negative effect on instructional decision making in the classroom. He suggests that “the content of standardized test is not usually in tandem with typical classroom instruction and behavior because it must be generalized” (OCadiz, 2013, para. 7). Teachers have been known to modify their teaching practices and their classroom instruction to prepare students adequately for tests. Standardize assessments are known to reduce group activities among students. The disadvantage of standardize testing is that some students simply do not perform well on tests because of test anxiety. Test anxiety hinders student’s performance and has a negative impact on children’s social, emotional, and academic well-being students are intelligent and understand the curriculum, but it does not show

Ever since then standardized testing has been a huge part of education. Teachers across the nation had to teach to the curriculum instead of what they thought the students needed to learn. Nowadays colleges strictly look at ACT and SAT scores rather than classroom grades, because they believe that some teachers grade on a curve and are not giving the students a fair chance. Standardized tests are an unreliable measure of student performance. A 2001 study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year tests core improvements were temporary and “caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning…”(“Standardized Tests”). Teachers are stressed over if they are teaching “correctly”. They went to a 4-year college, some even more, to get a degree in something that they wanted to do, either for themselves or for the children, and now they have to “teach to the test”. Tests can only measure a portion of the goals of education. A pschometrician, Daniel Koretz says, “standardized tests usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.”(Harris, Harris, and Smith).

Right brain? Left brain? Both sides are very different and have their own characteristics that help determine what a persons potential strengths and weaknesses will be. “The human brain is split into two halves, each with its own unique abilities. This phenomenon, discovered three decades ago by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Roger Sperry and his associates at the California Institute of Technology, is known as brain lateralization” (Raudsepp, 1992, p. 85). Certain characteristics of a person can go so much deeper then just hobbies that a person enjoys. Brain function can play a major role in how a person perceives their surroundings, such as if someone like to draw or do math. On the other side of that if a person is very analytical and good at subjects in school such as math it could be linked to which side of their brain is dominant.

When students think about tests, their thoughts tend to move more towards the idea of “how am I going to memorize all of this in one week,” I know this from experience. Why is this the way that students treat such “important” tests? I ask myself that question just about every time I think about taking an end of course test, SAT, ACT, or anything like that. All across the nation, students have also been introduced to a thing called common core, which has, for some reason, been made even more difficult than the previous set standards. This seems to be no solution to the problem, but will more than likely only worsen the ditch that we have gotten ourselves into, in terms of education. Before focusing on making school more challenging for students and teachers, would not it make more sense for the problem of students not actually learning the content of the course to be fixed first? With more challenging tests, comes more confused students who are willing to do anything just to pass; including flushing their education down the toilet. They do this by only storing the information in their short-term memory rather than actually learning the content of the class, but it’s not always their faults, either. The way the school system is set up, students are not taught how to actually learn the material or use it in real life. A student’s only goal is making good grades on the tests and surviving the class. This memorizing business can hurt students later on in life, as well. These kids get used to taking the easy way out, and will never learn the “deeper-thinking skills” that they need to succeed in the world today. “The focus on memorization, fueled by standardized testing, has obstructed learning, according to Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, who argues that students have been losing or squandering most of the information they acquire in school.” (Towler.) Even a

In this news article it gives information about Obama’s speech about how testing is taking too much time away from teaching. The main part of the article is that Obama "plans to limit standardized testing to no more than 2% of class time." This means teachers will have a lot more time to teach what needs to be taught over that one year. The teachers feel that this would put a lot of pressure on their lessons, and that their teaching mechanisms would have to be perfect. On the other hand, “When parents complain, rightfully so, about over-testing, what they are almost certainly responding to is not the tests themselves, which take up a vanishingly small amount of class time, but the effects of test-and-prep culture, which has fundamentally changed

Getting an education is the main goal for everyone, although it is easy to obtain there are some obstacles to it. One of the main obstacles students face at the beginning of their education is standardized tests. Schools have started to adopt this type of tests as their main way to evaluate students’ intelligence and teachers’ effectiveness to educate the students. The way students used to learn has changed, in order to get them ready for the tests they have to spend much of the school time preparing for it instead of learning something they can use in their future life. According to Bruce Jacobs in No Child Left Behind's Emphasis on 'Teaching to the Test' Undermines Quality Teaching, a 2007 study by the University of Maryland teachers were put in much pressure and had thoughts to teach the test […]. This shows that teachers have also been affected by standardized tests in a way they have more pressure to make students pass. Having teachers ‘teach the test’ means their way to educate has been corrupted. In most cases when teachers’ ability to educate has been changed leads them to practice methods not convenient for scholars. One of these methods is memorization, in Relying on High-Stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea by Hani Morgan describes how students start to adapt to an “inferior type of learning, based on memorization and recall students gain when teachers

According to Turgut, educational tests have improved in its validity and reliability since the initial introduction of standardized tests (65). Parents and educators who have experienced tests and quizzes every class time believe that if given more exams, students would have to