Standardized testing is meant to give an unbiased report of every student’s learning progress which in turn makes the scores comparable. Although currently, standardized tests have become anything but standardized. In this post we will go through reasons why standardized testing has become the bane of students, we will also talk about some alternatives to standardized testing that you as a teacher can apply in the classroom, and finally, we will talk about how technology can help students perform better at standardized testing.

What’s Wrong with the Way We Do Things Currently?

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Many people go with that adage for most things in life but there are many cons when it comes to standardized testing that you really need to pay attention to.

Teachers are meant to teach students and anything straying from the most efficient teaching in the classroom is a step in the wrong direction. When standardized testing is introduced in the classroom, more time is spent preparing the tests rather than preparing for lessons.  

When everything a student does hinges on the test results being good, it can cause students to be stressed. This was even more pronounced during the pandemic when there were various sources of stress on the students which then affected their test scores. All these reasons can cause the performance of students to be negatively affected.

How Can Technology Replace Standardized Testing?

Standardized testing is supposed to measure the learning progress of students. If we take the fundamental reason why we need standardized testing (measuring the learning progress of students), we can then use that concept to design the ideal classroom around it.

There are many intelligent adaptive technologies with embedded assessment technologies that provide enough data for the progress that a particular student has made in the classroom. There are technologies like Dreambox that give predictive insight into the performance of a student in standardized testing.

There are various remote learning software that tracks students and their progress. They provide so much data on the performance of students that the students might not need any form of standardized testing to gauge their progress.  

Technology to Prepare for Tests

Although technology provides a way to completely do away with standardized tests, it will still take time to get everybody on board. So in this section, we will go through some methods that you as a teacher can help your students perform better in standardized tests.

You can start by familiarizing your students with the type of questions a standardized test contains. Educational technology tools like ClassTime can help you create multiple-choice questions that provide immediate feedback to your students. This will make sure that they will not freeze up during the day of the test.

A theme that almost every standardized test follows is critical thinking. Critical thinking is a very important trait that every person needs to develop and the classroom is the perfect place to start. Critical thinking can be developed through discussions and debates in the classroom. You can divide your students into groups and give a particular topic for them to discuss. Ideally, the students will then debate and discuss in their respective groups about the topic. They can then be tasked to create slides to present their discussions. The way that they evaluate, analyze, and synthesize various ideas in the group will cause them to use the same process in the standardized tests.

One way to improve the understanding of concepts in the classroom is by showing students how what they are currently learning connects to the real world. You can connect history with science, physics with chemistry, and math with computer science. The world is interconnected, and it falls on the lap of the teachers to show the students how all the subjects they learn are connected on a foundational level. Connections help students understand more, which then improves their performance in all standardized tests and exams. 3D printers can be used to teach various physics concepts, computer applications can be used to teach math and computer science. Integrating technology to teach cross-curriculum connections can be as simple as showing them a YouTube video on a specific topic.

You can also use data analytics to tailor your teaching techniques to the requirements of the classroom. Platforms like Classtime lets teachers export excel sheets for individual students. It includes performance metrics for each student that can be tracked throughout the year. If you analyze the data, there will be many gold nuggets of information hidden in the data. You can then check up on individual students and see if they need help in any particular subject, or you can give them additional material to help them perform better. A teacher taking extra time to learn more about their students through data analytics can help the students learn more effectively, which will finally contribute to them performing well in standardized tests.

Conclusion

Standardized tests are a way to measure the progress a student has made in their learning journey in a comparable fashion. Ideally, a standardized test allows students to showcase how much they have learned. In the current times, standardized tests have fallen out of favor for many people in education. The tests have become a be-all and end-all for students, and everything a student has worked towards culminates in a couple of tests. This causes undue pressure and stress for students. There are various educational technologies that can replace standardized tests in the classroom. Technologies like embedded assessment technologies and various remote learning software allow teachers to get a clear outlook on the students in their classroom and their respective progress.

Since standardized tests are here to stay, for the time being, teachers can utilize various educational technologies to help them perform better in the tests. There are various applications online that allow you to mimic the style of standardized tests, like multiple-choice questions. Teachers can also teach critical thinking skills in the classroom by introducing discussions and debates, they can integrate cross-curriculum connections in their lessons to make the lessons more understandable. Finally, a teacher can use learning applications that collect data from the students, which can then be used to analyze the performance of each student.