As I looked for journal articles as a reference for talking about assessment of school age children, I came across hundreds of studies about the many ways to assess and measure a child’s learning of math, science, and literacy. I learned about summative assessment, which tells us if a child has learned the particular information from a unit of study. And I learned about formative assessment which tells us if a student is able to use the information learned to figure out what comes next. Summative assessment results are used to assign a grade, and formative results are used to make adjustments to continue with further learning(Colburn, 2009).And so on… While all this is important in terms of having basic skills to potentially become employed in a particular field, or to enable further higher levels of education, I wonder about the excess of it all. It seems that since the enactment of No Child Left Behind, schools are increasingly put under pressure to have their students perform well, hence the new phrase “teaching to the test”. Teachers and students are sacrificing the overall creativity and enjoyment of learning in order to memorize the information needed to score well on the standardized tests. Is this the education we want for our children? I read a few articles about assessment of children in China. It seems their learning is measured in much the same way as the children here in America, with standardized tests. There was plenty of information comparing American and Chinese children’s performance in testing. I think we need to be careful not to squelch learning in order to score well. I also am concerned that there seems to be little else measured. What about the “whole” child? Are we keeping track of socio-emotional development in the way we should be? Are we measuring how well children get along with each other (Stratton, 1997)? Or are we gradually diminishing “recess” or down-time so we can spend more time in preparation for the testing period? Maybe that is a topic for further research.
Colburn, A. (2009, April/May). An assessment primer. The Science Teacher , 10.
Stratton, B., (1997). Is there an ultimate measurement? Quality Progress 30(7), 5.
Joan, I agree we should be concern with our school system in the USA, and the pressure which is pushed on to our teachers for children the increase in their proformance at a high level of education has grown. We need to be ready for the next step with our children , with support for our teacher. Thanks for the information :)
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