I missed a lot of the current high stakes testing that students are taking now, but I have seen the testing impact through my tutoring experiences of college freshman. I have seen that they do not know the basic concepts in math or science that they desperately need if they want to succeed at the college level of math and science.
During my reading, I began to wonder if any research has been done on the number of entering college freshman that are declaring as Undecided. I wonder if this number has risen in recent years. I would suspect that it has risen because students are not given enough time or opportunity in high school to become involved in their learning. This is because teachers are hurrying through material so they cover has much as they can before students take the BIG test. By not allowing students to immerse themselves in material they may like, teachers are killing not only students desire to read by also learn.
From this thought and other ideas from Readicide, I believe that I will not skim through the material in my Chemistry class. If I go in-depth and ensure that students understand the material then I know they will 100% get those questions right. Also, the skills students will obtain from the material covered will aid them in figuring out other areas of the test even if the material is new to them. I believe that it is more important for students to have critical thinking and reasoning skills than it is for them to have good memorizing skills.
I think that finding out the percentage of undeclared freshmen would be interesting to know. I never had my interest raised from one subject to another, and that is why I had to start as undecided. I am willing to bet it's even higher now since teachers can not go in-depth as much as they would like because they are worried about the test.I also agree that memorizing skills do not show the true understanding of a concept. Lots of students can spit back information, but how many can tell you why it is that way?
ReplyDeleteRachel, unlike your experience I had to go through all the testing when I was in high school, they were just starting to implement all the EOCT's and everything else imaginable to test students on. I completely agree that students do get a chance to dive into any topic in any subject, because the teachers are forced to cover so much in so little time, they just have to skim the surface. I also wonder if this leads to so many college freshman being "undeclared" for so long? That would be interesting to find out.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience in high school we specifically had classes devoted to test-taking skills and also each class and more specifically language arts classes had to take time out of their normal lessons to practice test-taking abilities with their students.
Overall, I really believe that schools are teaching more to the test--in a bad way!
I think you are on to something, Rachel. If we just "cover" subjects, it's like eating white bread or minute rice. Not much substance there to wrap a passion around. It might be hard to go deep into everything, but certainly let your students be the barometer of when to really let them fill up with the content. I can even remember my teachers often saying, "well that's interesting, but we have to move on." Why? [and that was WELL before testing ;-]
ReplyDeleteRachel what a great idea. I think it would be very interesting to see the how the number of undeclared students has fluctuated over the past 10 years. I also wonder if undeclared majors would be aware that this might be the cause of their indecisiveness. Like would they say "in school i never really got into any subjects because teachers were always flying through the content i never got a chance to really enjoy anything" or would they just say "school is boring, so i never found anything i liked"? It would be a really cool action research project for the future maybe?
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