Standardized Testing, Essay Example

Standardized testing is obviously a very tricky issue in the modern education, since it is necessary on the one hand to keep ratings, formal assessments, and to understand the pace and direction at which students move along the curriculum. However, at the same time, testing has become a synonym of a blind, systematic assessment without any regard to students’ individual characteristics, which is in some way killing the aim of education, which is educating children and not discouraging them during the educational process through low marks. Treatment of testing by both students and teachers requires an urgent revision, since at present, failures are unacceptable, and both teachers and students try to make it through the semester to pass a test and meet the national standards. Nevertheless, tests have to become an adequate objective tool for students to accept their failure as not an absence of success but as a direction in which they have to work to achieve mastery in the subject.

As for Springer’s approach to reporting the action research results, I think I would choose the general report preparation instead of telling separate stories about separate students. The reason for this is that I use the group of my students to test my hypothesis about the influence of the child’s individual learning style and personality type on the preference of individual, pair, or group work to show the pathways for teachers to use this knowledge in their further teaching. Making it clear that Billie is an individual learner while Maggie is a team learner will not be of any use, since parents may be subjective, and may not agree with the results in case they believe their children are different. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the terms of individual, pair, and group work, as well as terms designating various learning styles, have to be clarified to teachers, parents, and students by means of giving some visual aids (depiction of various learning styles and their characteristics), and by acting out some classroom activities (or showing video recordings of each type of student work).