Standardized tests have been a staple of the American educational system for a number of years. At this point, it seems as normal as homework, bad cafeteria food, and vending machines that always seem to steal your money. Tests have increased in both importance and usage since No Child Left Behind was passed, but President Obama is looking to change all of that. On average, a student will spend 20-25 hours on testing a school year, and this is not taking into consideration the amount of time required to study just for the test.
This can be counter-intuitive to the learning process, as generally, teachers, considering their own self-interest, are teaching memorization over knowledge. To help counter this, President Barack Obama is looking to cap standardized testing at two percent of total time spent in class.
“Learning is so much more than learning to fill in a bubble,” President Obama stated as he talked about how standardized testing has hurt our education system. If these measures are put in place and given proper guidance, this could be a boom both for the educators and students.
For students, just the anxiety of test taking can be enough for these individuals to forget everything they previously learned. Much of their time is spent learning how to memorize the material that is laid out for them, instead of learning the material itself. The worry of trying to figure out what will and will not be on the test, as well as the the time wasted setting up to study, all makes up a stress-inducing incident filled with sleeplessness and frustration. Oftentimes, in this frustration, students will be turned off from the material covered at an early age, and start to disengage from activities that would help foster learning.
For our teachers and educators, the general structure of our test system places an exorbitant amount of pressure on showing results. Test scores have taken priority in our current system, and we see drastically increased measures being taken by these teachers to crank out the required information needed for just the test. This not only undermines the idea of being an educator, but also dictates how these people have to teach in their classroom. Often, teachers are pigeonholed into having to teach specific topics in a certain way, just to cover enough material to get their students ready for the test, without getting to properly teach their students why the information is important and what it means.
Certainly this change is a step in the right direction for all parties involved. While there is still much work to be done to help improve our falling education system, this is certainly a positive step towards fixing not only our teacher/student dynamic, but the growing reluctance in youth to want to better educate themselves.
