I think children shouldn't be assessed or measured at
all. I think it causes a lot of stress
to place measurements on them. I know many children who excel in different
areas and they lose confidence in themselves when they begin to compare their
assessments to others. I know we have to
track them in order to know how to teach and help them but what if the
information we come across wasn't the "end all, be all" for judging
success. This way there isn't anything
to compare and the child feels free to grow into themselves instead on being
molded into what we think is a whole child.
In China I know children are assessed my their academics. There is huge amounts of pressure placed on the
children at an early age to succeed in school.
They have to go through exams just to enter grade school. Also children are taught to be very
competitive with one another in order to motivate them to do their best.
After reading about how China assesses their children this
is why I chose my opinion of not assessing children at all. I could only imagine the pressure and the
feeling of being a failure I wasn't able to succeed and be the best in
school.
Dawn, my first research about how other Counties assessed, was China. It seems to me that China has a strict educational policy, not only on the students but also on the teachers. I think I read something about teachers having to be testing every year to determine their job and what grade they will be teaching. However, I do believe in assessing children, but I do not agree with the way some teachers use the results to label children.
ReplyDeleteDawn,
ReplyDeleteI think we would run into a bunch of issues if there was no way of assessing children at all. There are definitely issues in the way students in the US are tested at the moment, not taking into account the fact that the current assessments only allow to prove certain types of intelligence expressed in only certain rigid ways. This rigidity doesn't account for the fact that all children learn and express their knowledge in different ways and standardized tests can provide certain cultural, socioeconomic or other bias'. We need to expand our views on success and knowledge assessment and bring a human, feeling aspect to the assessment process, so that we can evaluate the successes of our education system without penalizing students or wrongly labeling them because of the way in which they were assessed and their ability to express that knowledge not matching up.
-Alyson
Dawn, I must say that I do think there is a time and place for certain assessments to be done. But I'm afraid that our current school system uses too broad of assessments way too often. For example I do not think that every fourth grader needs to be given the same test to see where they stand. The only "advantage" that I can see coming from this test at this age is to test how the teachers are doing. And if this is the goal then I do not think the students should suffer the stress and aggravation of taking the test. However, I do think that assessments testing for different learning delays are helpful in getting students the services they need. Thank you for making me think, have a great week.
ReplyDeleteJen
I think it would be great if we could do away with assessing all together, but unfortunately I do not see this as a possibility in this country anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteChildren are so different from one another and the tests favor only certain learning styles.