FREE ESSAY ON PORTFOLIOS AND STANDARDIZED TESTS - PROS AND CONS

PORTFOLIOS AND STANDARDIZED TESTS - PROS AND CONS

Portfolios and standardized tests are two types of ways teachers can assess their
students. There are many advantages and disadvantages to both assessments. Right now,
whether teachers agree with standardized tests or not, all teachers have to give them to
their students. Portfolios on the other hand, are not required in a classroom, because it
is not a required assessment for all teachers to use.
Portfolios are folders that hold students works in any or all subjects that teachers
choose to use them for. They hold all different types of work a student creates. It has A
work to work that needs more improvement on inside the folders. The students choose what
goes in their portfolio, not the teacher. Standardized tests are tests administered to
each student at the same time. They have a time limit to them and their test scores are
based on the norm.
Much of school-based assessment does actually prevent students from becoming thoughtful
respondents to, and to be able to judge their own work. Portfolios help students learn to
assess their own progress as learners, and teachers gain new views of their
accomplishments in teaching. They also give students responsibility for taking the lead
in evaluating their own work, enlarging the view of what is learned, a place for process
and a developmental point of view.
Some important things that matter when dealing with portfolios is a student's performance
on the kind of skills that appear on tests, that first-draft work is good enough and
achievement matters to the exclusion of development. There are centrally two aims that
teachers have for student portfolios. The first is to design ways of evaluating student
learning that, will be essentially providing information to teachers and school systems,
it will also model personal responsibility in questioning and reflecting on one's own
work. The second is to find ways of capturing growth over time so that students can
become informed and thoughtful assessors of their own histories as learners.
What teachers have students do is at the end of the school year, is let the student go
back inside their portfolio and reflect on their own work. The students return to their
portfolios or collections of work, and see what has changed from the beginning of the
school year or what still remains to be done or worked on. This gives students a
responsibility, because they are responsible for evaluating their own work.
Authentic or performance assessments do provide opportunities for students and teachers
to learn, often together, about the standards of good work with respect to more valued
outcomes. Each student is often incorporated in as an active agent in the evaluative
process, not as an object to be evaluated. The portfolio activity is a process of
production, perception, selection, and reflection that is exercised by each student over
his or her collections of school work. Portfolios even provide a school district with a
level of achievement. 
Portfolios are profoundly important to children. All children have a natural ability and
desire to tell a story through the contents of the portfolio. Student portfolios tell a
story. The real contents of a portfolio are the child's thoughts and his or her reasons
for selecting a particular entry. That selection process reflects the interests and the
metacognitive maturity of a child and the inspiration and influence offered by the
teachers. Portfolios serve as a metaphor for our continued belief in the idea that
children can play a major role in the assessment scene of their own learning.
Using an authentic assessment tool could provide a more realistic picture of each
student's individual subject achievement and progress by demonstrating growth and
development over a period of time, involving students in assessing their own growth and
reflecting many aspects of students area of knowledge and understanding. Portfolios
provide teachers with information about students' progress, thought processes,
achievements and needs. They should accommodate teachers' and students' individual needs,
while allowing students to take an active role in assessing their work and encouraging
them to take responsibility for their own learning. Students should begin to set goals
for themselves and check their progress toward reaching these goals. This will help
promote self-esteem. Students and teachers can fill portfolios with individual journals
entries on any subject area, explanations of problem-solving activities, individual
interpretations, results of group projects or any other items that students may feel are
important and demonstrate the student's abilities. Physical knowledge is gained by
observing and manipulating objects. Portfolio development redirects student learning in
mathematics from computation and application towards problem-solving and reasoning, which
every student should have built into their classroom curriculum. They also demonstrate
the value of problem solving, communication and confidence to preservice teachers and to
allow these teachers to gain insights about their own students' perceptions of their
teaching.
Assessment in education has clearly become more of a problem in today's society. Every
state reports above average scores on norm referenced achievement tests and everyone
agrees that these kind of tests should not drive instruction but their number and
influence should nevertheless increase. Assessments are responsive to individual students
and to school contexts. Evaluation is most accurate and equitable when it deals with
human judgement and dialogue, so that the student that is being tested can ask for
clarification of questions and explain his or her answers. An authentic test does not
only reveal a student's achievement to the examiner, but also reveals to the test-taker
the actual challenges and standards of the field. Using authentic standards and tasks to
judge intellectual ability is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. An authentic test
enables teachers to watch a learner pose, tackle, and solve slightly ambiguous problems.
To design an authentic test, we must first decide what are the actual performances that
we want students to be good at or improve on. Most criterion referenced tests are in
adequate because the problems are contrived, and the cues are artificial. All tests
should involve students in the actual challenges they will face, standards, and habits
needed for success in the academic disciplines or in the workplace.
Standardized tests are systematically compared with the performance of other similar
students. There are some negative aspects to standardized achievement tests. They begin
with not being able to promote student learning, poor predictors of individual student
performance, mismatched with the content emphasized in a school's curriculum and
classrooms, are racially, culturally, and socially biased, measure only limited and
superficial student knowledge and behaviors. Also, standardized tests might lead some
teachers to teach to the test rather then to teach material that would address broader
educational goals for their students. They do have the potential for racial or gender
bias and this could make standardized tests an unfair indicator of a student's
competence. 
Standardized tests are well suited for assessing students' recall of factual knowledge
and their ability to solve problems that have unambiguous right answers. When used to
test this type of knowledge and skill, they produce reliable, consistent scores. These
tests are efficiently economical to develop, administer and score, and easy to
standardize and norm. Developmental reading professors need to use standardized tests to
determine students' reading, thinking, examination, and note taking skills so they can
meet their student's needs for materials and instruction.
Schools need to help prepare their students for standardized tests that would maintain
the integrity of the school's curriculum and its methods of learning. A way to do this,
is to have students interact in workshops to help them take standardized tests. When
children do take part in these workshops, they have gained more confidence and skills,
and their test scores have improved significantly. But these workshops might not work the
same way for all children. Children are told that these standardized tests are not
important. But these tests are important and can affect a child's life. It can negatively
affect students' motivation and does little to help children understand how to cope with
feelings of fear and incompetence. These test scores are often used to make decisions or
judgements about students. Achievement test scores may determine placement for a child in
a subject-area tracks and in remedial and enrichment classes. They could also determine
whether a child should go on to the next grade level or be retained. Sometimes scores can
be affected by a child's ethic, gender and economic background. For instance, if a child
has lived in the city his or her whole life and has never seen any other place, then he
or she would not be able necessary to answer a question about the suburbs, if he or she
has never seen what a suburb even looks like. That is why sometimes standardized tests
could be considered an invalid achievement test. Teachers are held accountable for and
schools are judged on how the students do on these standardized tests. It reflects back
on them.
An objective to standardized tests is to create a controlled environment so that
differences in performance can be attributed to differences in the behavior being tested.
Standardized test are often poorly constructed, leaving the possibility that differences
in performance are due to problematic test items rather than to differences in a
student's ability. Also, standardized tests do not use a rubric like other assessment
tools do. Rubrics appear more realistic than a standardized test score because they
remove the illusion that social and intellectual traits can be measured with extreme
precision, because they are easier to understand. It seems that some of the reasons
standardized test can be so unreliable is because of examiner errors, over interpretation
and failure to include certain age groups of students. Standardized tests are norm
referenced and designed to measure a limited range of skills and talents across large
populations.
When doing this research paper, I noticed that there was not a lot of information on
standardized testing in a positive way of assessing students. During the five weeks of
class discussions, I seemed to get the same interpretation from my peers. It does not
seem to be the best affective way for teachers to assess their students any more. There
are so many new assessment tools out there today, that teachers do not need their
students to take these standardized tests any more. They can receive the same information
about their students by using these new methods and they can assess what the teachers
want them to assess. For instance, the student portfolios is one of the new popular
assessment tools teachers are now using in their classroom to assess their students on
the way they want to. They do not have to administer, score and they will not be an
unreliable or invalid way of assessing students. Plus, there is no culturally, social,
gender, economic bias when using student portfolios.
I am not a classroom teacher yet, so I have not personally used portfolios or
administered any standardized tests except for the one we did in class. So I can not say
whether one way is better than the other from experience. But I can give my opinion based
on what I have learned in class and research. It seems that standardized tests are
unreliable and hard to understand on how to read the test scores and they do not really
show a teacher what a child can do or does know. I did talk to some teachers on the
elementary level about standardized tests and portfolios to get their opinion. All the
teachers I talked do not like administering standardized tests to their students. They do
not understand why they have to give them because it does not show a student's true
knowledge and ability of what they can do. I did ask them if they use any types of
student portfolios in their classroom. It seems that the most popular type of portfolio
to have in your classroom is a writing portfolio. The teachers say you and the student
can learn so much from each other with portfolios. After reading all the research
material, I received on portfolios, I think I would like to use portfolios for almost
every subject that I would be teaching. Because the teacher can learn how a child is
doing in every subject while using these portfolios, plus the students can evaluate
themselves on how well they are doing in every subject by looking through their
portfolios month to month. I think eventually standardized test will not be a big
stressor to school districts, teachers and students. Soon, other assessment tools will
take the place of them and students will not be judged as a norm but as an individual.
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