High Stakes Assessments

Educators are experiencing almost great pressure to show their effectiveness. Unfortunately, their state/district indicator by which most communities judge a school staff's success is student performance on standardized achievement tests. These tests and some assessment tools that have been created do a great job of providing comparisons of student's content mastery with that of students nationwide then educators and parents can make useful inferences about students.

It is evident that standardized testing gives parents a good idea of how their children are doing as compared to students across the country and locally. This can also indicate how your local is doing compared against the national landscape. But standardized achievement tests should not be used to evaluate the quality of education. That is not what they are supposed to do due to many external factors that could affect these results and gave false negative outcome about the school, teachers and students.

Lets start talking about the High-stakes testing/Standardized testing and High school graduation exams and their impacts on school, teachers and students.

The introduction of High school graduation exams; these exams test a high school student's level of knowledge in core high school subjects. students must pass these exams before they are graduated. American College Test (ACT), Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and advanced placement (AP) Scores are used to assess whether academic achievement increased after High-stakes high school graduation exams were implemented or academic achievement did not change after the implementation of a high school graduation exam.

High stakes testing could be defined as any test used to make important decisions about students, educators, schools, or districts, most commonly for the purpose of accountability to ensure that students are enrolled in effective schools and being taught by effective teachers.

Related to the IRIS Center regarding the High stakes impacts:

• High stakes affecting schools by having the authority to close, revoke schools accreditation, take over or reconstitute low-scoring schools and monetary awards are given to high performing or improving schools.
• High stakes affecting teachers or administrators by replacing the principals or teachers due to low tests scores or monetary wards can be used for teacher bonuses.
• High stakes affecting students by having monetary awards for scholarships for college tuition given to high performing students, grade-to-grade promotion upon promotion exam.

At the school that I teach American International School of Jeddah (AISJ); periodic assessments are used to identify if students are meeting the curriculum standards. AISJ currently used three standard-based assessment tools to identify each student's academic achievement:

• NWEA MAP test                                                 
• Renaissance Learning STAR Assessment
• Development Reading Assessment

All students will be taking online assessment tests using NWEA's Measures of Academic Progress which is computer adaptive assessment for Reading, language usage and mathematics. Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) testing precisely measuring student progress and growth for each individual so teachers have essential information about what each students knows and ready to learn so teachers have a plan for how they use time for either intervening with students that need it, or providing enrichment to challenge those higher-level students.

AISJ has started using the Skills Navigator; a classroom assessment to support day-to-day learning by getting the information teachers need to guide daily classroom decisions and instructional resources that help each student master specific skills they need to be successful and support educators to help students with diverse needs and close achievement gaps- as has been mentioned- It is even appropriate for Tie two Response to Intervention (RTI) Progress monitoring programs.

All students will be taking the STAR assessment; computer-adaptive tests for reading, math and early literacy. They can be used for progress monitoring and intervention, reporting results immediately to help inform planning and teaching and tell whether or not our children are meeting age-related expectations. And due to various students levels especially here in Saudi Arabia, AISJ has found that it is necessary to design literacy instruction to meet the individual needs of each student that can be determined by initial and ongoing reading assessments to provide teachers with the information needed to develop appropriate lessons and improve instructions for all students, including students with disabilities.

Comparing to some other schools in the U.S. such as North Carolina Public Schools; they use a broad range of assessments that promote learning for all students; Using North Carolina End-Of-Grade tests(NC EOG) and North Carolina End-Of-Course (NC EOC) to determine each school's Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). That provide data that will help parents, teachers and students improve academic performance in reading, math, science, writing and other subjects. The NC EOG and NC EOC tests are scored on four performance levels, with level 1 being the lowest and level 4 the highest.

All schools and students' families devote time and effort to helping their students learn, making sure that homework gets done and reading everyday to build fundamental skills and using test prep programs to get students familiar with test formats and time restriction and practice strategies for different types of questions.

Using MAP program as well in most public schools in NC has really helped the teachers adapt their curriculum to each student. The implementation of this program will hopefully help the NC public Schools achieve their goals and improve in the state rankings.

As we can see; Standardized testing may cause many teachers to only "teach to the test". This practice can slow down a student's overall learning potential. with the stakes getting higher and higher for teachers, this practice will continue to increase. The sad reality is that it fosters and atmosphere that is too boring and lacks creativeness. Teachers have such pressure to get their students ready for these exams that they would not focus to teach students skills that go beyond the tests. however, some communities find standardized testing are better preparing school students for college and helping educators and schools to plan effectively for their learning but we should keep in mind how best to measure students learning and how the use of high-stakes testing will affect student  graduation rates, course content, levels of student anxiety, and teaching practices. and how social, economic factors could affect testing results.
All communities/agencies or programs need to examine carefully its pros and cons to help in nowadays educational challenges.






References:
1. High Stakes and Higher impacts: The effect of High-stakes testing on school and classroom operations. Retrieved from
chrome-extension://cbnaodkpfinfiipjblikofhlhlcickei/pdfviewer/web/viewer.html?file=https://twp.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Mesler_09.pdf on January 26, 2017.

2. The impact of High-stakes tests on student academic performance: An analysis of NAEP Results in states with High-Stakes tests and ACT, SAT and AP tests results instate with High school graduation exam. Retrieved from chrome-extension://cbnaodkpfinfiipjblikofhlhlcickei/pdfviewer/web/viewer.html?file=http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/EPSL-0211-126-EPRU.pdf on January 26, 2017.

3. Is the Use of Standardized Tests Improving Education in America?. Retrieved from
http://standardizedtests.procon.org/ on January 26, 2017.

4. North Carolina EOG test prep. Retrieved from
https://www.time4learning.com/testprep/north-carolina-standardized-test-prep/ on January 26, 2017.

5. High-stakes testing from the IRIS Center. Retrieved from
http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/hst/cresource/q1/hst_04/#content on January 26, 2017.