As a recently qualified teacher of further education, that is high school in the U/S and sixth form in the U/K. I wonder if teachers from the primary sector could comment on the real value of testing primary school pupils in areas such as maths and english? Do these tests provide reliable and valid measures of achievement? Or do these tests put too much pressure on developing intellects of primary school students?

I think it is a two-sided issue. Students need to be tested to ensure that they are learning and retaining information, to ensure that they are keeping up with the class and are ready to move onto the next level.
However, the trouble with standardized testing is that teachers have to take so much time preparing their students for the test, teaching them not about the material but how to take test itself, that it cuts into valuable class time when they could actually be learning something useful.
Standards are important. Standardized testing tends to be counter-productive.

If a student doesn't come out of elementary school[Kindergarden through 6th grade ] with the ability to read,write and speak English...and be able to add,subtract,multiply and divide numbers [without the use of a computer or a calculator] he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding in this world [unless he's a sports star or a rock star]! He's doomed to spend the rest of his life working for McDonalds.K Mart or WalMart.
Schools do the child no favors when they pass them on to the higher grades when they haven't learned the Basics.

I think it is too easy to blame the teachers, blame the schools, call for testing both the teachers and the students, and at various stages. Expecting the teacher to cope with overcrowded classrooms, discipline, second-guessing administration and parents, etc. are not problems likely to be solved by the panacea standardized tests. I have seen far too many teachers spending far too much time teaching students to pass tests, when, in fact the brightest students in a class might well be one who is worst at taking these silly "blacken in the little ovals" tests.

I have to agree with what frankvan says. I am not an expert on primary education and have no experience what so ever with this age group. But I can see the need for testing to ensure that children lean the basics, have understood the material and can retain this new learning.
However, I do view my own future career with some degree of resentment towards the culture of testing. Testing has now become the new idealogy that is sweeping FE in the U/K. Most of my course well, 50% was spent with monitoring student's progress and meeting this target or the other. Criteria ia another word which I can not hear now without feeling faint.
I just don't feel I get enough time with my students. To teach. Frankvan makes the enlightned point that not all students even at the top end of the performance scale of intellectual ability like testing and exams and I have to agree.
Hence the move towards vocational qualifications in the UK.

First of all, Silver Thunder, welcome ! Another Briton and trained for a while as a lawyer, I see. Hmm. That makes two of us who can mislead Americans about matters British, if we take a mind to it. Other Brits around here seem patently honourable.....but trained as a lawyer for a while, eh ? Knowing my luck you gave it up as not morally suited to it ( to put it in our technical lawyerly terms of art, if you get my drift.....some people did not stop .....)



Anyway, testing in primary schools. Yes.


There's point at all in screening young children repeatedly. It gives employment to the screeners, obviously, but what can be learned from the results? Its sole purpose seems to be to check that the teaching staff haven't suddenly abandoned the national curriculum or abandoned teaching the children and gone off elsewhere at dead of night never to return ! In other words it is to have something to wave about to show that that/those mysterious thing/s " Standards" is/are "maintained", nay, not "slipping" but "rising" ( this tired language is contagious). It seems to me to be nothing to do with children qua children learning anything and everything to do with appearing to be doing something about education.The result is that teachers seem to spend more time teaching how to pass the test itself than teaching the subject.

For some reason Hill House, the private junior school my girl attended, didn't see the need.They 'tested' their children every day and every minute. It happened naturally that every child was being checked whilst being taught. It was called teaching.The tests were continuous in that sense and each teacher knew every child and who was learning and who was not and took appropriate steps.Such periodic tests as they had were no more than a natural double check on that, not an end in themselves.


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