Ask Dr. McCune
By Lorraine McCune, Ph.D.

How can parents and teachers cope with high-stakes testing?

Children, parents and teachers have the most to gain from quality schools and the most to lose when schools fail. We read of a national goal to have all students achieve academic success within 10 years. But what about students in classrooms right now? Events of 10 years hence will be too late for them. To insure the success of current students, parents and teachers need to emphasize a variety of learning strategies that engage children in classroom work and intellectual activities outside the classroom.

We need to build children’s confidence so that they do not see tests as scary monsters, but as opportunities to display knowledge and skills. Parents’ and teachers’ fear of testing can be easily transmitted to children and high anxiety is anathema to successful test performance.

Intense after-school practice on test-like items may backfire as children lose the will to learn and the expectation of success. Rather, we should structure class time well, with activities that prepare children to approach tests calmly and confidently. For example, Dr. Elizabeth Young studied the effect of peer-evaluation and interaction on children’s writing skills. Children practiced writing to a prompt (poem or picture) as the NJ Writing Test for fourth grade requires, in the informal comfort of their classroom. Those who were taught the “writing rubric” that would be used to score the official writing sample and had practice evaluating their own and peer writings out-performed students who received only teacher feedback on a post-test. After this experience the children could look forward to the “real test” as a performance opportunity.

So we must not cede all power to the testers. We are the ones who teach the children every day. There are ways to “de-mystify” standardized tests, like learning when to guess, and skipping hard questions for later. Some orientation to testing is helpful, but let’s include games and enrichment in after-school activities, not merely drill in testing.#

Dr. McCune is an associate professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education and serves as advisor to educational toy company, General Creation. She can be reached at www.generalcreation.com in the “Ask Dr. McCune” section.

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