The Case for (Serious) Testing
I just re-read this excerpt from the OECD’s report on Lessons from PISA for the United States. As I try to understand why kids seem to care more about school in other countries, I keep coming back to this. We do an insane amount of testing in the U.S., but none of it matters much for the lives and futures of individual students…. We do very little to help kids connect the dots between what they are learning in school and what kind of car, job and life they will have as adults. They find out eventually, but way too late:
In the United States, high school students may be led to believe that the outcome is the same whether they take easy courses and get Ds in them or take tough courses and get As. Either way, they might think, they can get into the local community college and get on with their lives. Contrast this with a student of the same age in Toyota City, Japan, who wants to work on the line at a Toyota plant. That student knows that she must get good grades in tough subjects and earn the recommendation of her principal, so she takes those tough courses and works hard in school. The same is true of the student in Germany who wants to work for Daimler Benz in their machine shop or the student in Singapore who wants to go to work in the factory automation shop a few blocks from his home. The reason examination systems matter is that they provide strong incentives for students to take tough courses and study hard. One of the most striking features of the American education system, in contrast with the education systems of the most successful countries, is its failure to provide strong incentives to the average student to work hard in school. If the reader does not, for whatever reason, like the idea of examination systems, then the lesson learned here should be that some other means, no less effective, should be found to motivate students to work as hard in school as students in other countries do.
Learning said on November 07, 2012 at 3:45 pm
I strongly believe the reason why kids in other countries are more willing to learn is because they don’t have things as well U.S. kids do. Besides, for example here in europe I do not think that children are any more exciting about learning and going to school than in U.S.
المؤشر said on November 12, 2012 at 6:37 pm
Thanks Amanda
With regard to kids every country depending on its environment for
Bruce William Smith said on November 12, 2012 at 9:14 pm
This case has been well made recently in two excellent books, Marc Tucker’s “Surpassing Shanghai” and Vivien Stewart’s “A World-Class Education”. Nonetheless, part of the resistance to high stakes testing in the United States is due to the poor quality of our tests, and in particular the dispiriting backwash effects of preparing for something as simultaneously stressful and insipid as a multiple choice test.
Maya said on November 27, 2012 at 5:24 am
Nice article, Thanks for sharing…
Pikavippi said on December 02, 2012 at 10:15 am
I am pikavippi from Finland and here kids are not that happy to go to school either and things seem to go into wrong direction every year.
Tom Hoffman said on January 10, 2013 at 12:29 pm
What if the problem is not that the schools aren’t creating incentives but that the workplace mostly isn’t, and to the extent that it does, kids don’t understand enough about what jobs even exist to form a rational plan.
How many kids (or adults) even know the biggest employers in their area any more? In how many cases do those look to a 14 year old like something to strive for? If you can even make it to the point where you figure out that becoming a specialized medical technician is a good idea, we have a system where guessing exactly what training, and from whom, and the expense of getting is is place ENTIRELY on the individual. That’s not how they do it at Daimler Benz.
funny pictures said on February 05, 2013 at 6:42 pm
Now a days, students should really put more effort on their studies since competition is getting tougher and tougher as days and years goes by.