Dear Mr. McMannon,
Should our school continue using our current midterms and finals? I would like to share my opinion with you on this subject. CVU should stop using memorization-based midterms and finals to test students’ knowledge and learning. Many would say that it is difficult to assess student learning without these tests, but I would beg to differ. There are other forms of assessments that would be a more accurate representation of student learning such as prompted essays that take the information of the class to another level, projects that demonstrate the learning of the student, a graded Socratic discussion, as well as other open-ended assignments that allow students to accurately display their knowledge. Since most current midterms and finals are biased toward students with advanced memorization skills, create and add stress, and are often unrepresentative of student knowledge, they should be done away with as soon as possible.
One of the most important parts of the school’s mission is to provide all students with the ability to pursue their desires. With our current standard midterms and finals, we are not achieving this aspect of the mission statement. Some students have impeccable test-taking skills whereas others may “freeze up” and be unable to access information that they had spent hours memorizing days before. According to Gale’s health and wellness resource center, many children suffer from test anxiety which causes students to be unable to recall information previously studied, and therefore the tests do not represent the students’ knowledge or level of memorization. If we continue using these types of tests to assess overall knowledge of students that represent 20% of their yearly grade, we are being prejudiced against people who suffer from test anxiety.
While equality is one major thing to consider when formatting major assessments, the level of stress being placed upon students is also important. When one walks through the halls of our school in January and June, she can tell that the stress level among the students is very high. According to a study done in Baltimore in 2004, 68% of students said that school was one of their top 5 stressors. It has also been found that when adolescents are overly stressed, they perform poorly in school, often have increased blood pressure, and have an increased tendency to show aggressive behavior. We cannot allow students to continue feeling the stress that is triggered by large tests; it has been proven unhealthy and should not be continued.
Lastly, the major reason that we as a school need to move away from fact-based midterms and finals is that it does not seem to be an adequate representation of student knowledge. Knowledge comes from understanding not memorization. Most standard midterms and finals test mainly students’ abilities to memorize not their levels of understanding. Knowledge is like a flower; the intricate facts, like the petals, will quickly fade away but the basic understanding of the concepts, like the stem will always be there. For this reason, I believe that it is important that we test the root of knowledge by using assessments that focus less on factual information and more on intellectual understanding.
Although many would say that the traditional midterms and finals are the easiest solution to testing overall knowledge, I disagree. These tests are not easy to conduct or prepare for, and they do not accurately test the knowledge of most learners. It is wrong to continue testing students in ways that unequally favor one style of learning, cause unnecessary stress, and are inadequate representations of knowledge. Why should we continue to use these tests when we have more options for assessments that would decrease the problems that these factors create? As a school, CVU needs to take a step forward and abolish the use of fact-based midterms and finals for the betterment of our student body.
Sincerely,
Elly Colwell
No comments:
Post a Comment