Standardized Testing: Help or Harm?

Outside of the halls of education, we have many real-world ways to test knowledge and skills. If we want to teach someone to bake a cake or do a J-stroke in a canoe, we don’t give a paper and pencil test – we look for successful demonstrations of the skills. Even where we need a paper test for some head knowledge stuff, like when we get a driver’s license, the road test is the real proof of the pudding. In school settings, then, what we really need are valid measures of what students know and can do. A well-rounded toolbox of authentic measures of student learning can help us maintain truth in our statistics, excellence in performance, and individuality and freedom in our focus as students discover God’s gifts and talents in their lives. Posting about standardized testing and the concept of calling in educational settings from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world. http://inallthings.org/standardized-testing-help-or-harm