Measuring Up Standardized Tests

Career and technical schools strive to not only teach the technical skills required for students enrolled in their programs, but they also try to ensure that students achieve on state standardized academic tests. In Pennsylvania, all students are required to take the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSAs). The PA Department of Education’s Bureau of Career and Technical Education has developed many initiatives to help improve student achievement on this exam for students enrolled in CTE. One specifically is the PIL (Pennsylvania Inspired Leadership) program. This 30-hour program was developed to “provide CTE leaders with the knowledge and skills to work with teachers to improve the achievement on the PSSA math and reading assessments.” Participants were provided with material to understand the PSSA assessment for math and reading, and taught how to enhance instruction for the areas addressed.

Now I am not writing about the concerns I have with holding career and technical schools responsible for PSSA scores when there are teachers who are certified and trained to teach these subjects. I am not going to complain about the additional work that we are doing as high school teachers to ensure that we are bridging the gap on academic achievement, when that should’ve been taken care of way before the students entered high school. I am not going to discuss the problems with our percentages on these tests, when over 50% of our students are identified with learning disabilities. What I intend to do is provide you with information to make you think about standardized tests and what they are doing to the education system. Sure, I am all for helping students achieve. In fact, I believe that is what I do best. However, I am not sure if all of this additional work and stress is really going to make a difference in the lives of our students.

At MBIT, we test all students on their proficiency levels in math and reading using a benchmark assessment called 4Sight. Students who score less than proficient on either of the aforementioned areas are required to participate in a remediation program called Study Island. My responsibility as the classroom instructor is to monitor the students’ progress and make sure they log a minimum of 45-minutes per week. This, by far, is the biggest challenge I face with my students. Unfortunately, they just don’t want to do it! During these times, I truly feel for the teachers who teach these subjects, as I am sure it is difficult to get students to work on these subjects when they are just not interested. Now, I can go on and on about the importance of engaging students in these subjects by making them relevant, and contextualizing learning by applying it to real world scenarios, but I’ll save that for a later article. I personally have tried everything, including forcing the students to complete more hours of work if they do not complete the assigned 45-minutes for homework. I have removed the students from projects in our Mac lab and forced them to do Study Island assignments in school. All of these methods have been counterproductive to my goal as a career and technical teacher. However, the problems with these tests have never struck me more than they have this school year.

During the first marking period of the 2011-2012 school year, I had a student who just refused to do his Study Island work. He continually mentioned that he had already scored proficient on this exam, and was not required to complete it at his sending district. After further review, we learned that he indeed scored proficient on the 4Sight testing the previous school year, but scored basic when he took the test at our school. Was it the context in which he took it, the time of day, what he ate, etc.? Either way, this raises a lot of questions.

The main concern that I have with standardized tests is the inconsistency in measuring student achievement. Are these tests truly designed to accurately represent the knowledge that our students have gained throughout their school years? Or are they simply an indication of the student’s concentration, attention span and the environmental conditions of the testing room on that particular day? From the experience that I had with my student and his 4Sight test results, I tend to lean towards the latter explanation.

Another concern that I have is the relevance of standardized testing, and how well it translates in the real world. As a career and technical educator, it is my responsibility to ensure that my students are properly trained to gain employment and that they are prepared to enter a post-secondary institution. I take this a step further, and also impart 21st century skills, including both employability and personal productivity skills. I believe these skills are equally as important as the technical knowledge that my students learn from books and hands-on experience in the classroom. I am less concerned with my students’ grades on a test, than I am with their ability to accurately apply the knowledge they have gained on a hands-on assessment and the soft skills they learn from applying their knowledge and skills in context. After all, in the real world, how many jobs or industries require their employees to take a written exam to test their knowledge of a particular job skill? Having worked in the multimedia industry for over 20 years, I can attest that an individual’s performance on the job is what an employer uses to evaluate an employee, not a written test score.

For this reason, I have often thought about the relevancy of the scores students receive on standardized tests and their success in the "real world.” Obviously, we would need to do a case study and follow a cohort of students over the years and draw conclusions from the data. But what if there was a way to test some of the most successful people and see how well they score? Recently, I read an article from The Washington Post that provided those exact results.

A prominent school board member of one of the largest school districts in America voluntary took his state’s standardized math and reading tests designed for 10th graders, and made his scores public. It turns out that he knew none of the math questions (but managed to guess on 10 out of 60 correctly), and received a 62% on the reading test. He believes that if he took those same tests when he was in 10th grade, his life would have certainly turned out differently, since his scores would have indicated that he was not college material. He states, “It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

Finally, I would like to address the seemingly inevitable possibility that standardized test scores will be used to evaluate teacher performance. The idea that the test scores of students are an accurate reflection of how effectively a teacher performs in the classroom is ludicrous, for the reasons I mentioned previously. In a data-driven society where numbers on a paper dictate the decisions we make in our educational system, we are focusing our attention away from the real issue: the achievement of our students. What we need to do is identify a better method of evaluating student achievement, other than a written test.

One such way is to make the National Occupational Competency Test Institute’s (NOCTI) competency exams, or other similar assessments, a viable alternative to state standardized tests. As a career and technical educator, I rely on the NOCTI as an indicator of the job readiness of my students, because it tests both their technical knowledge on a written portion and the practical application of that knowledge on a performance portion. And yes, both math and reading skills are incorporated into the test! The difference is, it is applied knowledge, in the sense that the students are utilizing the exact same math and reading skills they will be required to apply in the workforce. Therefore, it is relevant to them, they are more likely to retain it because they have to apply those skills on a daily basis, and they are interested in learning it because it is a part of their chosen career path.

That is the key to holding the students’ interest long enough to learn the academic skills, while at the same time boosting student achievement scores: having the students apply their knowledge in a relevant context. So, what's the main reason why standardized test scores are falling across the nation? They are not measuring the knowledge and academic skills that our students will be asked to apply in their careers in the real world.

Resources: Fact Sheet PSSA 2010

PACTA PIL Program