Every teacher remembers having a student who, at one time or another, tried too hard. Low test scores, poor quiz results, and repeated setbacks were met with increases in determination and effort that only added to the student's confusion and frustration. If that effort did not lead to improved performance, the student became more angry and upset. If the trend continued unabated, the student's interest in learning waned, and resignation and detachment eventually replaced eagerness and energy.
Much like that student, some observers believe, many school systems may also be trying too hard when it comes to preparing their students for high-stakes tests. Rather than "teaching toward the test" and using assessment examinations as an opportunity for thoughtful curriculum restructuring, some schools are actually teaching the test itself as the curriculum. The results, some experts and educators assert, can be disastrous for both students and their teachers. So how can teachers still find ways to help their students learn when state test scores have become so important?
The Changing Landscape
The increasing accountability that has accompanied the reliance on high-stakes testing—test results are used for everything from determining student placement to teacher and administrator pay raises and school funding—has profoundly affected the content of classroom teaching, according to many education experts. Teachers and administrators have reported sweep-ing changes in several states, including the cancellation of entire subject areas—not just arts and music but also traditional "hard" areas like math and science—so teachers can devote more time to preparing students for state tests.
"In 1997 I was told by my vice principal to devote more than 50 percent of my class time to test preparation," says Vivian Coss, a former public school teacher in Manhattan, N.Y. "The bulk of the preparation consisted of having the students identify key words in the questions—such as 'how' and 'when'—and then determine how to answer the questions. The materials were prepared by outside test preparation specialists and had nothing to do with our textbooks. It was boring, and the students hated it."
Other teachers have reported similar experiences. "When I taught 3rd grade a couple of years ago, we took practice tests called 'testlets' every day," says Karen Lounsbury, a prekindergarten teacher in Lincoln County, N.C. "Instead of teaching reading and writing skills, I found I was teaching the testlets themselves. The children could not apply anything they had learned because all they wanted to know was, 'Will this be on the test?' It created a climate where the test was all that mattered."
What makes these experiences so disturbing, according to education experts, is that they appear to be part of a growing trend. "I've been in a number of school systems where the focus has been one of devoting larger and larger blocks of time for literacy instruction in lieu of science, math, social studies, and fine arts," says Bonnie Benesh, an organizational change consultant in Newton, Iowa, who specializes in education issues. "In several states, the teachers are giving up on strategies that are good for the kids, and some schools are doing away with subjects and recess because they feel they need to give the children more time to prepare to take the test."
That kind of emphasis on test scores can have disastrous consequences for students. In addition to inflating student abilities with misleading results, the atmosphere of importance surrounding the exams can promote a success-at-any-cost attitude that brings out the worst in some schools.
"Many of my underachieving 6th graders were placed in high-level 7th grade classes as a result of their test performance," says Coss. "I later found out that several of the students who had made the most significant leaps in terms of their achievement on the tests had been in a room proctored by one teacher who actually went up and down the aisles telling the children when their answers were wrong." She continues, "The school then placed the students the following year based on their test scores, and of the 28 students I had, only 10 of them later went on to graduate from the 8th grade."
"Conceptual Velcro"
Given such stories, many education experts have expressed understandable concerns over how states are addressing the requirements of testing. What can be done, they ask, to improve students' scores without making the tests the primary focus of education?
The answer may lie in rethinking the approaches schools use to prepare students for tests. Though the state standards are often lengthy and intimidating, experts point out that they are manageable when students are taught for understanding rather than strictly for the test itself.
"There is potential tension between the desire to cover a lot of material and the necessity of using more time-consuming methods that allow students to construct meaning from their lessons," says Jay McTighe, an education consultant and cocreator of the Understanding by Design program. "The quintessential challenge for teaching today is determining how to deal with the pressures of so many standards and the need to cover material for high-stakes tests."
The obvious temptation, McTighe and others say, is to try to cover as much course material as possible to prepare students for the enormous volume of information that will appear on the tests. McTighe likens this approach to trying to cover a mattress with a bedspread: the content is "stretched out" to encompass all of the test material, but the result is a thin level of understanding rather than a deeper and more meaningful one. The consequence, he and others contend, is that the knowledge the students receive is seldom retained after the school year ends because it simply does not "sink in."
"Most people can remember cramming to study for a quiz or a test in high school, but soon after the test, they forgot the material because it was never presented to them in a meaningful way," McTighe says.
Rather than using such a "bedspread" approach to cover the required material, McTighe and others argue, teachers and administrators should develop comprehensive strategies for incorporating the concepts outlined on the tests into their curriculum. "If you think of the content standards as collections of discrete concepts, facts, and skills, you're never going to cover them all, because in most cases there are just too many," says McTighe. "The proposal Grant Wiggins and I have suggested [in Understanding by Design] is to identify the 'big ideas' or concepts and core processes contained in the standards, cluster the specific facts and skills under those larger ideas, and then teach toward understanding those ideas."
This approach, McTighe and other experts say, is far more effective in helping students build their knowledge of the subject matter than having them memorize lists of discrete facts or forcing them to sit through "testlets." Students who are taught using the concepts of big ideas develop a more thorough understanding of the material, and this helps them retain knowledge. That, in turn, puts them in a better position to reflect this knowledge on assessment tests. "A teacher I worked with said these kinds of strategies about big ideas provide 'conceptual Velcro' for the particulars and concepts to stick to," McTighe adds. "I think that that's very reflective of what we know about learning."
One example of how this big ideas approach helps students can be seen in history lessons, says McTighe. A lesson on the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence, for example, should not necessarily focus on simple things such as the date the document was signed or how many signatories it had but rather on why the document was significant and what made it so groundbreaking. These concepts can then be "linked" to the rights and principles outlined in the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution, and students can trace the development of those rights and principles throughout history.
This linkage and depth, McTighe asserts, is essential in helping students both remember what is taught and relate it to other concepts they encounter in their learning. "If knowledge is taken in and memorized in disconnected chunks, you quickly forget it," he says. We need to teach the content standards in a way that will yield real learning and not just superficial coverage."
Pooling
Another strategy that some schools have used to prepare for high-stakes tests involves forming "teacher pools" where instructors review the standards of their state at the beginning of the year and work together to outline plans for the coming exams. Teachers can identify sets of common terms that will appear on the tests and incorporate those terms in their lesson plans. The terms can be included in all classes—science, English, mathematics, foreign languages, and so on—so that the students are exposed to them every day and have an opportunity to become familiar with them throughout the year. That familiarity, experts contend, helps reduce the intimidation students experience when they sit down to take the tests.
Curriculum experts also suggest that teachers employ schedules and time lines for their lesson plans. The time lines help teachers track the progress they need to make during the course of the year if they are to cover what the students need to know for the test. They also help provide a common frame of reference for administrators who track teachers' performance throughout the year.
Taken together, experts say, these approaches produce far more positive results than simply preparing students for tests through rote-memory exercises or repeated practice drills. "These methods of developing critical thinking skills and cause-and-effect analysis, combined with close coordination by our teachers, have really helped us raise our students' scores," says Sara Shoob, a social studies coordinator for Fairfax County Public Schools in Fairfax, Va. "Of the 24 middle schools in our county, 21 saw increases in their social studies scores last year."
Still, incorporating such techniques in the classroom is not without its challenges. Revising curriculum—and, thus, revising the process of preparing students for testing—takes time, as well as a fundamental change in the way teachers and administrators look at testing in the first place. "That's the rub," says McTighe. "This is very time-consuming, more so than just running through the facts in a lecture form or having the students read a textbook."
Despite these challenges, however, McTighe and other experts point out that preparing students through such techniques does produce results, both in terms of classroom studies and performance on tests.
"We revised our entire curriculum around the Virginia Standards of Learning and the national standards to define what was essential knowledge," says Caryn Galatis, chair of the department of science at Edison High School in Alexandria, Va. "We defined what we considered to be the six central themes in chemistry and then hit those in a very basic way with every unit." The results, she says, were dramatic. "On a gross analysis, we were able to raise our scores on the Standards of Learning from 24 percent passing in the spring of 1998 to more than 70 percent in the most recent school year."
From Theory to Practice
Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the big ideas principle is that it does not limit itself solely to such classes as science or mathematics. The theories behind such an approach can encompass all subject areas in the curriculum. "Many teachers can more readily envision employing constructivist teaching practices in social studies and language arts than they can in math and science," says Jacquelyn Grennon Brooks, director of science and education programs at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "But there's really no difference, other than how the theories get transformed into practice."
Students in reading groups, for instance, can discuss common themes from different books and determine how various authors examined those themes in their writings. Students can also glean an understanding of the times in which the authors and characters lived through the examination of primary sources, such as photographs and diaries, to help deepen their understanding of what life was like in different times. The rights of people, for example, could be examined from the time of the Revolutionary War in the 18th century through the Civil War in the 19th century and up through the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century.
Do Tests Themselves Make the Grade?
Even with such constructivist teaching practices, many experts contend that to really understand what students have learned teachers need to look not at how students perform on a one-time assessment but rather at how they express what they have learned in different ways throughout the year. High-stakes testing, they argue, can be detrimental to learning and undermine many of the practices that have been so critical to successful teaching programs.
"Test results are false positives," says Brooks. "The direct link between the teacher and the standards to be taught is seen as this one-event test. It doesn't have to be that way."
McTighe agrees. The practice-testing frenzy, he argues, "intellectually neuters the curriculum" and does not allow students the opportunity to show what they have actually learned. "Good assessment should be thought of as a photo album rather than a snapshot," he says. "We should use different pictures and different lenses to get at different aspects of learning over time."
How then, educators and others ask, should students' knowledge be assessed? Many experts have suggested that to really grasp what students have learned, a new approach to measuring and evaluating must be adopted. Such methods could include allowing students to assemble portfolios of their work or permitting them to demonstrate their knowledge through in-depth projects instead of a once-a-year exam. Still others contend that tests can and should be used but that they should be used in conjunction with portfolio projects and other similar methods to produce a more well-rounded assessment of student learning and ability. "If we can give teachers autonomy within the framework of state standards, our chances of creating schools that are meaningful places for children to go to each day is increased," says Brooks.
However, given the continuing emphasis on reforming education and the strong desire by both politicians and the public to improve the standing of U.S. students internationally, high-stakes tests are unlikely to vanish any time soon. The result, some suggest, may be a "things-will-get-worse-before-they-get-better" kind of outlook.
"You can goose test scores up by doing a lot of practice testing," says McTighe. "But that yields the worst kind of rote teaching and disengaged learning. The best teachers will resist this—that's not why they went into teaching—and the kids aren't going to put up with it either. At some point, if the standards movement and the testing component remain in place, someone is going to find alternative routes to improve learning, and then we're going to see performance on tests go up."
That kind of effort, experts say, would be the right kind of focus with the best likelihood of success. Rather than trying so hard to bring up test scores by concentrating solely on tests themselves, educators and administrators could bring those scores up by incorporating the standards into their curricula and using them to prepare their students for the tests instead.
Or, to put it another way, by not trying quite so hard.
