standardized testing

Standardized tests can’t measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes.

Concepts like intrinsic motivation and intellectual exploration are hard for the prosaic mind to grasp, whereas test scores, like sales figures or votes, can be calculated and charged and used to define success and failure.

Any aspect of learning (or life) that resists being reduced to numbers is regarded as vaguely suspicious.

Politicians of widely divergent political orientations think testing students will improve learning. Testing has increased dramatically in the past ten years, and if it worked in the simplistic way that some politicians seem to think, kids today would be the most learned students ever.

It is easier to measure efficiency than effectiveness, easier to rate how well we are doing something than to ask if hat we are doing makes sense. …the process of coming to understand ideas in a classroom is not always linear or quantifiable.

Emphasis on standards and results: (1) undermines students’ interest in learning, (2) makes failure seem overwhelming, (3) leads students to avoid challenging themselves, (4) reduces the quality of learning, and (5) invites students to think about how smart they are instead of how hard they tried.