As summer rolls around, educators and students alike breathe a deep sigh of relief. Another year has come and gone, and another round of standardized testing has finally been completed.
For many, EOG season is amongst the most stressful and overwhelming times of the year.
North Carolina’s End of Grade exams determine whether or not a student is “career and college ready,” “proficient,” or “not proficient” in the test’s respective subject. They also determine the letter grades that are received by schools, whether or not schools met projected growth, and are often used as the sole measure (particularly for elementary schools) to determine the health and success of a school.
District officials are faced with mounting pressure from the state to show growth and increase proficiency, which trickles down to administrators, educators, and then to individual students.
Every year, educators like myself feel required to abandon our typical lesson structures to begin EOG review.
Even the best of educators who pride themselves on refusing to “teach to the test” throughout the year typically must give up some of their class time to teach students how to succeed on standardized tests. While most educators believe there is the need for accountability and for some form of assessment to determine what students are learning, they also recognize that the EOGs aren’t measuring our students’ full knowledge of the content area. A multiple choice test can’t measure students’ critical thinking skills, their ability to write beautiful narratives — they only measure their ability to take a highly specific form of test.
Even though I know that my students have a deep understanding of the content, the wording and framework of the EOGs is often intentionally tricky, with only one answer being the best answer. It is not enough to ensure that my students understand the basics of the Standard Course of Study — they also need to know the tips and tricks that will help them “beat” the test.
As an educator, my focus has always been on forming strong relationships with my students. Being honest about the test — and reminding my students that it alone doesn’t measure their full intelligence — has been a core part of our classroom culture. Even the North Carolina Testing Code of Ethics acknowledges that the EOGs should be used in combination with other factors to demonstrate student learning.
I began thinking a lot this year about standardized testing and how it was serving (or not serving) my students. More than ever, my students voiced their frustrations with standardized testing and the process of reviewing for EOGs. Multiple students asked me this year, “Who can I contact to ask more questions about why we have to take EOGs?”
As I noticed a pattern, I began tracking all of the questions students asked me about standardized tests. Middle schoolers can often get a tough rap, but I find them to be particularly in-tune with their emotions and the world around them. As we continued our EOG review, I began hearing more and more insightful questions from my students. Here is a real (and certainly not exhaustive) list of some of the questions my eighth grade students asked me this year regarding the EOGs:
“Who can I contact about these? Is this something I need to take to the superintendent, or do I go straight to the president?”
“Why do they have to be so long? Why can’t they test our knowledge using one fiction passage, one non-fiction passage, and one poem?”
“How does this determine what I’ve actually learned this year?”
“Why do we have to read the passages on the computer? I like it a lot more when I can read on paper so that I can take notes.”
“In 5 years, will it matter how I scored on my EOGs?”
In addition to the questions from my students, I also began thinking this year about everything I had to give up as a result of EOGs.
Educators know that every moment of classroom instruction is valuable and that giving up any part of our curriculum not only hurts the students, but also ourselves. So often, it feels like engaging activities such as Socratic seminars and creative projects that help build students’ durable skills are the first ones eliminated when it comes time to squeeze in EOG review. In a world where these durable skills are being prioritized for jobs, how are we serving our students by placing activities that develop these skills on the back burner?
In order to measure the impact of the EOGs in my classroom alone, I began to quantify some of the aspects of testing so that I might be able to measure just how much I have to give up as a classroom teacher in order to prepare myself and my students for state exams. Here are some the totals:
- 6 instructional days lost to completing practice tests, teaching strategies, and reviewing how to answer multiple choice questions prior to Check-In exams; 3 instructional days lost to reviewing commonly missed questions/passages with students and having them reflect on their own data after Check-In exams; 7 instructional days lost to EOG review prior to the EOG test
- Total of 16 instructional days (or 9% of the school year)
- 9 hours of in-school meetings with administration reviewing Check-In data and highlighting students that need additional support
- 26 total in-school hours spent completing formative iReady or Check-In exams
- 96 chocolate chip granola bars consumed by my homeroom anxiously the mornings of the reading, science, and math EOGs
- 19 lessons cut from the end of my favorite nonfiction “Teens as Change Agents” unit to make room for testing and review
There is so much more that cannot be quantified when it comes to the complicated feelings that myself and many other educators have surrounding standardized testing.
You can’t add up the feelings of inadequacy that students share or the eerie silence of the hallways during the testing session. You can’t count the tears shed, the sighs huffed, or the snaps of pencil tips breaking. For educators, the hours of sleep lost, the number of Tums consumed, and the numbers crunched can’t be summed.
All of these factors and so much more are an integral part of our students’ experiences with standardized testing, and yet only a single number is given back to them as a measure of their performance. Despite the reminder that these tests shouldn’t be the end-all be-all for students, it is the only metric that is used to determine whether or not a school meets expected growth. It is also one of the critical measures used to determine whether or not a principal is allowed to stay at their school, and whether or not a teacher is “effective.”
It is time that legislators, stakeholders, and educators begin to think deeply about all that we lose as a result of perpetuating the myth that a single test on a single day is a valid measure of student knowledge.
Editor’s Note: Although Emma is an employee of Jackson County Public Schools, all opinions stated are her own and do not represent the views of her employer.
