When people think about testing, most people would agree that it would be a useful tool to assess our familiarity with knowledge. For us students, school tests are most relevant to us in term of its direct effect on our learning. Testing involves applying different tasks, which includes retrieving memory and making judgments in a stressed amount of time. Completing these tasks often seems to improve our learning, as it enhances knowledge retention (Mok & Chan, 2016), but we often ignore problems that are involved in test taking. Thus, under the scope where testing improves our leaning, this paper is going to explore the problems that are associated with testing. While testing can enhance our long-term retention, it is also associated …show more content…
This problem is the most obvious in true or false kind of testing. During the true or false section on an exam, students are exposed to many false alternatives. Sometimes, some of the false alternatives are very similar to the correct answer as they only vary in order of words or a small part of the content, which makes student even harder to distinguish. Will this exposure to the considerable amount of false knowledge have an impact on our learning? Researcher Toppino (1989) had the same interest and conducted an experiment on the impact of taking true or false exams on students’ learning memory. Participants were told to read some passages about 12 U.S. presidents and then took a true or false exam. One week later, they took a second exam rating each item from definitely false to definitely true. Some items on the second exam showed in the first exam, whereas the rest of them were not. The result showed that the mean validity rating in the second exam is higher regardless of whether the items were true or false (Toppino, 1989). Toppino’s study indicates that students tend to confirm their choices made in their previous attempts. The result has two indications. First one is that it shows that, in some extent, testing has a positive impact on learning as it involves retrieval from memory that will enhance our retention. However, it also means that students will tend to remember the false knowledge, as they believe it was correct when they see it the second time. Thus, when using testing to improve our learning, we need to be aware the false knowledge that we may be exposed to, and distinguish the correct answer from it, so that we will not learn something that was not
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.
Standardized tests have historically been used as measures of how students are compared with one another or how much of a particular curriculum they have learned throughout the semester or year. Consequently, standardized tests are being used to make major decisions about students, such as grade promotion or high school graduation, and higher education evaluation. Various numbers of students across America have had to repeat classes because of the way standardized tests are used to pass or fail students. Although the tests require students to retain information until the end of the semester, I believe it is wrong to allow just a single test to decide whether an entire semester’s work will be rewarded with the credits that may have been well-earned. Some standardized testing such as the SAT, are not fair to students who may come from a poor educational background and do not retain information as their fellow peers. Students are at a disadvantage if they have test taking anxiety, which is a condition that many students suffer from “a feeling someone might have in a situation where performance really counts or when the pressure's on to do well” (Test Anxiety). Standardized tests give a false pretense of objectivity and consequently of equal opportunity. However, "the only goal of standardized tests is the scoring, which is done by machine" (Facts on Standardized Tests and Assessment Alternatives). It is made clear that the purpose of testing is to provide information to be used in conjunction with, not in pl...
As a college student, is the idea of your final grade being based off of just a midterm and final very stressful? O 'Malley argues in his essay "More Testing, More Learning" that professors should give out more quizzes and assignments to reduce the stress and procrastination students face before midterms and finals. Although this might be helpful for a high school setting, it would not be completely efficient at a college level. This is because frequent testing takes up a significant amount of students and professors time, are added stress throughout the year, will not fix a students procrastination, and having high stake tests prepares students for their future. Some of O 'Malley 's ideas seem reasonable and would help students while others are an inconvenience for the professor and students.
Standardized testing assesses students, teachers, and the school itself, which puts a great deal of pressure on the students. High scores show that the school is effective in teaching students, while low test scores make teachers and schools look as though they are not teaching the students properly. This is not always the case. There are teachers who do teach students what they need to know to pass the test, but their students are still unprepared. Although teachers try to improve instruction, student performance is still variable to other factors that the school cannot control.
Some students simply do not test well, others try their hardest and still cannot reach the impracticable standards set for them. The individuals who create these tests do not understand the pressures of being a student, or the struggle to answer thirty-five questions in a compressed time period. One test cannot accurately measure the intelligence of a student.
Developing studying skills that incorporate testing myself will take the ease of being overwhelmed, as well as help with concentration, and becoming more comfortable and confident. Practicing recalling information over time will help in recalling for an actual assessment, by retaking study guides, and creating at home pre-test. 3The information provided by Karpicke and Roediger can me as an educator and other educators by considering various methods of learning. Using test as an instrument of learning rather than solely an assessment on knowledge can be essential in helping students’ learning effectiveness. Since the experiment showed that the learning conditions where retrieval was repeated caused students to have 80% of the pairs recalled compared to the 33% of where retrieval was not practice shows that testing can be used as a tool of learning. In my classroom I would implement take pre-test for homework and/or extra credit assignments, as well as implement classroom activities such as games where testing occurs in a communal group setting. Retrieval is easier when related pieces of information are stored in close association with one another (Ormord p. 212). Therefore, I would have students get in pairs and test each other on the information as soon as the lesson is over as a form of review and test
Altogether this study has helped us learn more about the brain and memory. Learning is measured thorough when a student can reiterate the right answer to a question. In this study, students in one conditions learned forging language vocabulary words in standard example of recurrent study exam trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly formed the language item, it was constantly studied but dropped from further testing. Repeatedly tested but dropped from the further study or just dropped from both the study and also the test. The results reveal the critical part of retrieval practice in combining education and shows that even college students seem naive of the fact.
“One test result is the worth one-thousand expert opinions.” The result of standardized testing can establish many results but do they imply the true capabilities of a student or their ability to study for the test. I will discuss in this paper what the arguments on both sides are for standardized testing.
High stakes testing does not accurately determine a student’s intelligence. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences researched the appropriate and inappropriate uses of tests. They agreed that “no single test score can be considered a definitive measure of a student’s knowledge”(http://www.allianceforchildhood.net/news/histakes_test_position_statement.htm).
Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
Standardized testing has become a dominant element in the education world. It is now used not only to judge a student’s knowledge but to judge the effectiveness of a school system’s teaching. Standardized testing is not an accurate or efficient way to judge a student’s intelligence or a school system’s instructional abilities.
Pressure is being exerted on students to pass, and teachers to enable their students to pass the standardized tests being presented to them. This takes much classroom time that could be spent instructing students on what might be more valuable information, and instead study for the test by what some consider rote memorization (Silva). Experiments have been done seeing how much different teaching approaches were before and after the implementation of standardized testing (Desimone). These experiments demonstrated how vastly the difference between teaching to the test and teaching what the instructor believes is the most valuable knowledge and the best way to present this knowledge. If there is a disconnect between what America’s teachers believe is best to know, and what is on the examinations, then one of the two is flawed, and it is not likely to be what the teachers are teaching.
...re I think if the participants are not aware of it, the false recall rate will increase. And if there are more words presented, my assume is that it will increase the false recall rate.
...Dermott, K. B. (1996). Misinformation effects in recall: Creating false memories through repeated retrieval. Journal of Memory and Language, 5(2), 300-318. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1996.0017
There are many various issues about the education system which are controversial today. One of these common issues nowadays are schools concentrating on raising standards to evaluate knowledge for students. Many students have been working extremely hard just to achieve higher scores on tests. However, asking students to do many difficult tasks in their studies, is really not helpful now, is it? That is why Alfie Kohn wrote the article, “Confusing Harder with Better”, showing his dissatisfaction with the current educational system. In the article, he complains against “raising the bar”, meaning since they raised standards, teachers are making students memorize facts for tests instead of engaging intellectually with them. In other words, with