Ruby Mandler
27 November 2023
Education 101
I found the lecture where Steve Sireci joined us as a guest speaker to be very informative
and has brought up a lot of thoughts and points that I had never considered regarding educational
testing. In this course we discuss a lot about the MCAS. I am from New Jersey and at first I had
thought something along the lines of “what's the big deal with these tests?” I thought that in my
state, there was almost no standardized testing apart from data collection. Something that Steve
said that spoke to me was that all states are required to test but only seven you have to pass for
graduation New Jersey being one of these until only last year. That means that in my experience,
my peers and I went through these exams that were required for graduation, unaware of the effect
that some of these tests would have on our futures. During this time I hated testing, I was never
very good at it and always felt somewhat resentful towards the test taking away my learning time
and making me feel less than. I think Steve brings up an interesting point with the idea of
student-centered testing. I also like that he brought up that testing shouldn't exist as an obstacle,
but solely as an evaluation. I also found tests to be unnecessarily stressful due to time limits and
found it hard to get the accommodations that would have helped me in a lot of standardized
testing. One point I found interesting that Steve brought up is the idea that the student should see
the benefits of testing and receive information about themselves in the process. I'd be interested
to know more about what he meant by that and how you would do that in a summative testing
environment. Finally, something that stuck with me was the idea that testing should not be
noticed. I remember standardized testing in schools to be so obstructive. We'd often take days out
of instructional time to take these exams. A critique I've always had of standardized testing is
that once we begin teaching to get the best test scores, we stop teaching to learn and I think
nobody benefits from that. Many of the points that Steve brought up were interesting to me
because I never truly thought about the development of standardized tests beyond the
implementation of them. I would be very interested to hear more about the implementation of a
lot of his ideas of standardized testing in schools, and how the purpose of schooling could shift
from using standardized testing as a comparison and competition, to using it as a tool to improve
learning.