Is there a way to measure the mind or intelligence of a child? Intelligence as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary as (1): the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations; also as (2): the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests). When I think of measuring a child’s intelligence, I immediately think of the standardized test that are administered annual or bi-annually in the South Carolina school systems. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of standardized assessments for children, for several reasons. For the purpose of this post I will stick to one reason. Teaching to the teach.
My first year of student teaching, I taught in a third- grade classroom. In South Carolina this is a major testing year. During my time in this class, I often heard the teacher tell the children that they needed to retain the information because it was going to be on the test in March. A lot of what was taught in the class was what was expected to be in the test. This puts pressure on the students and the teacher. The school system not only uses these tests to assess the knowledge of the children but the effectiveness of the teacher. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. It basically gave the federal government a greater role in education.
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According to ThoughtCo., one of the main complaints about the NCLB was the consequences attached to the test scores. This caused the teachers to focus much of their teaching time to focus on the information that was going to be on the test (West, 2018).
In China the value of educational assessment is equally as high. Chinese classrooms focus on 6 main practices:
(1) rigorously controlled teaching demonstrations that are frequently evaluated by peers and administrators.
(2) maximizing student scores on all forms of evaluation.
(3) removal of curriculum content not explicitly evaluated by the examination system.
(4) high student workloads to ensure mastery of examination material
(5) teacher-centric transmission of discipline-specific and “bookish” knowledge
(6) mechanistic, rote-learning, memory-driven learning and pedagogical strategies (Brown & Gao, 2015).
Although the United States test teaching strategies are not as rigid the importance of during well on standardized test are equally important to both countries. As mentioned before there are several reasons, I am not a fan of standardized test for several reason; cultural and socio-economic bias, the idea of teaching to the test and the idea of a standard generic test measuring the knowledge of children in a general format not accounting for learning styles. I feel that assessments should be organic in natural, assessing the natural progression of what a child has been taught not the sporadic jumps in curriculum to test something that is going to be on a standardized test.
References
Brown, G. T., & Gao, L. (2015). Chinese teachers conceptions of assessment for and of learning: Six competing and complementary purposes. Cogent Education, 2(1). doi:10.1080/2331186x.2014.993836
West, C. (2018, May 7). The Pros and Cons of Teaching to the Test. Retrieved October 18, 2020, from https://www.thoughtco.com/teaching-to-the-test-pros-and-cons-4158535