Standardized Testing

Standardized Testing
On January 8, 2002, President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act. This act was signed to redefine the government’s role in education; as well as the teachers and parents (US Department of Education, 2004). The main purpose of standardized testing is to determine the percentage of students that are knowledgeable and skilled in each of the three subject areas of reading, mathematics, and science. The results from these tests are to ensure the state’s requirement for adequate yearly progress has been met. It was designed to hold schools and teachers accountable, which has caused focusing a great deal of attention on the results of state standardized testing. Which is why standardized testing can have negative effects on both teachers and students because it can change the curriculum and learning style, cause unnecessary stress, and is unfair to certain students.
Standardized testing can change the curriculum and learning style of how students are being taught. There are some who feel that a standardized test allows administrators, teachers, and parents the opportunity to view solid evidence of the students’ performance, which in return could determine what and how they teach. This is because of the NCLB, which has mandated the classroom curriculum to concentrate more on the main three subjects of reading, mathematics and science which is used to determine if the adequate yearly progress has been met (Department of Education, 2013). Since teachers are experiencing an incredible amount of pressure to raise test scores, it has caused them to remove material from their regular lesson plans that is not being tested in order to increase the amount of time they have to cover material that is on the test, which also can be identified as teaching to the test. According to the author James Popham (2009), “It is simply not possible for teachers to teach all of these curricular aims during a single school year—or rather, it’s not possible to...