Sir Ken Robinson response

I’ve never really had a bad experience with high-stakes testing as a student; it never seemed to make me or my classmates too nervous, but my teachers would certainly be. The school would always emphasize making sure you got a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast. I think the stressful thing about it for me as a student was just the weird, icy feeling that the classroom had that seemed so out of the ordinary, the proctors being hawkeyed and walking around like we were criminals.
My viewpoint on high-stakes testing has become somewhat more extreme since I’ve decided to become a teacher myself. What was before just a weird few days of school is now going to be my end-all, be-all show of my worth as an educator, and considering that I’m looking to teach at traditionally under-performing schools, I’m not comfortable with it at all. Now I can see why my teachers were nervous (and all my elementary experience was before NCLB, so I imagine it’s much more stressful now).
       Teachers drill students on what they think is in the test, what they imagine the children will fail at, etc. In general, there is a big emphasis on the fundamentals of basic skills and little emphasis on higher-order thinking (examples of which may be impractical to have in a multiple choice test, generally). When I think about the kind of classroom I want to have when I go to teach elementary school, I don’t picture the whole thing like “get everyone up to minimum standards”, I want to help kids and feed their natural curiosities about things and stretch their thinking and give them opportunities to show their talents. Of course the fundamentals are important. I am not arguing against literacy or math at all. But I think it’s a huge misjudgment of learning to say you can’t think about bigger things before you master the basics.
            I think the idea of standardized testing should be shifted to be merely an assessment of how students performed on the test. By making it the goal, and by having so many incentives and punishments based on the results, it loses its validity as a measure of genuine growth and becomes its own curriculum (albeit a vaguely-defined one). I think in lieu of high-stakes testing (at the elementary levels), we should have a meeting with the instructor and their administrator about student progress, and a discussion about whether they should continue to the next grade level. I am not opposed to standards or anything, but I feel like people at the school would be able to best assess based on their long-range interactions with students what their progress is. I feel like, in secondary school, high-stakes testing has less of a negative impact because students can handle it better and understand long-term goals more, but again, the way they are used can be criminal to struggling schools. I don’t have any illusion that my method will happen. But isn’t that the way it used to be done? With tests merely providing an occasional look at how the country was doing, and teachers having the discretion over their students’ progress? I don’t know, but I also don’t know if there’s anything I can actually do about it.

Motivation and Affect response

The theories of motivation I find most helpful are the cognitive and sociocultural theories, because I feel that many of the things outlined in these theories as being causes of motivations are things a teacher has some control over.

From the perspective of the cognitive theory, students are more intrinsically motivated when they feel like they have control and choice in what they do (self-determination). For a teacher, this means that giving students some choice in how they approach an assignment or what the topic could be will raise their motivation and engagement in a task. This may require a bit more planning on the front end for teachers, but things could still be assessed similarly. This could be as simple as, in a unit on biography, having students choose a person to study. At the same time, giving students choices like this will tell a teacher more about a student’s interests and strengths, which will also help with motivation if the teacher keeps them in mind for future planning.

The sociocultural theory is about creating a classroom environment that values learning so that, within that context, students will seek out learning experiences, and hopefully over time, internalize the value of learning, even if only in an academic context. Creating a classroom culture is probably a lot easier for an elementary school teacher than a secondary school teacher, but luckily, I will be an elementary school teacher, so I will have a lot of influence over the school experience of a relatively small number of students. Creating the desired culture in the classroom will happen in a lot of ways, from the way seating is structured, to the kinds of assignments given, to the kind of things that are seen as deserving of praise — for instance, asking good questions rather than just having the right answers. It will have to be a conscious effort at first, but I hope that eventually I will become attuned to what works in promoting my values (and I mean that in the least brainwashing way possible). 

Summarizing Students' Achievement and Abilities response

High-stakes testing and its impact on studentsA lot of the reading in this section seemed to indicate that using standardized testing as a singular assessment
is really dangerous, for a lot of reasons. Mainly being: that one grade on one test is basically useless without
context; that the assessment needs to cover relevant material in a relevant way; that only students in intermediate elementary grades are really going to be giving their best efforts. The increasing emphasis on high-stakes testing has a big impact on the daily classroom environment, too--this is talked about at the end of the chapter. The biggest thing, for me, is how it affects the curriculum (which obviously affects both teacher and student engagement and motivtion). This is really toxic in an elementary classroom (coincidentally my area of particular interest).The assessments have become less measures of expected learning and more goals in and of themselves, if that makes sense. And that’s a problem. For instance, the Common Core standards only address language arts and math. In some elementary schools now, these are the only subjects addressed. Phonics drills as far as the eye can see. Kids need to have their curiosity sparked and their creativity given room to grow, but it’s just not happening as much as it should in some stressed-out classrooms. Teachers are told to focus on the kids “in the yellow” to bring them to the minimum of what is acceptable, and so the kids falling too far in either direction are left to the wayside. There is so much emphasis on differentiation in teaching methodology, but when the goal moves from being “get the kids to learn as much as each of them can” to “make sure everyone can meet the minimum standard (which is increasingly high)”, differentiation can fall by the wayside, and a lot of the development and learning that needs to happen in elementary school that isn’t purely skills-based (for instance, general knowledge, social aspects, and critical thinking) is sidelined. Proponents of this high-stakes stuff seem to forget that learning arithmetic and reading was already a pretty big focus of primary school, and they seem to ignore the fact that being punitive about who does and does not meet the standards is not super helpful.

Classroom Assessment Strategies response

Norm-referenced vs. Criterion-referenced assessment
Norm-referenced and criterion-referenced assessment have their own pros and cons, but one potential mistake would be to think this decision is only made when it comes time to grade. Based on the text, it seems that the content of the assessments should differ in meaningful ways. For criterion-based assessment, the questions should cover the basics of the topic at hand: things every student is expected to know. With norm-referenced assessment, the instructor should be including items they don’t expect every student to know. Norm-referenced assessment, then, seems to be a little more involved than simply grading on a curve after the fact— a classroom’s full range of ability should be represented in the results. Thus, norm-referenced is probably not the best kind of assessment to use for grades. I think it is fairer, where earning credit is concerned, that an instructor’s expectations be clear ahead of time. Still, norm-referenced assessment has its place, and it can be a great tool for understanding students’ width and breadth of knowledge. Criterion-referenced assessment, while it should be able to show mastery and show gaps in areas of knowledge, has its downsides, too. First, it holds everyone to the same standards, which may not seem fair in a classroom of mixed-aptitude students. Secondly, how useful it is as a valid assessment depends very much on *which* criteria are being tested on. It should avoid focusing on trivial things. Neither type seems to be better or worse than the other, just suited towards different goals.

Student accountabilityI wonder about the role of student accountability when it comes to outcomes. Certainly, there are times when the assessment is bad or the instruction is insufficient, but something still sits wrong with me about this. The idea that if someone fails, it is always because the teacher isn’t teaching hard enough is one that seems to put an unfair amount of the responsibility for success on the teacher. I’m not sure *why* I’m uncomfortable with it, necessarily, because it’s obviously a lot of times completely the case— where a teacher needs to adapt methods, or tap into a student’s motivation. But it also seems really intimidating, as a prospective teacher.

Grading without bias
The call to grade each assessment without being biased based on a student’s previous efforts, or by your own emotions, really resonated with me. I feel like my little brother was kind of caught in this when he was in school. He was kind of all over the place for a while, but when he tried to turn things around and make genuine, concentrated efforts, his teachers still seemed to never fully trust or support him. It was like they were always looking for a way to catch him slipping up, to prove that it had been for nothing. Obviously I’m a little biased here too, but I think it’s important to, in general, take a student in good faith. But how can you balance that with using what you learn about your students over time?   I feel like so many of the problems I think about in ideology/methodology come down to: how do you balance your ideals and best practices with a bit of common-sense cynicism?