Test prep is not teaching. It’s cheating
Professors from Arizona State University, Dr. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Dr. David C. Berliner and Dr. Sharon Rideau, referred to teaching to the test as “cheating in the third degree” in an article they wrote in 2010 for Education Policy Analysis Archives.
They note that though the causes may be: apathy, sloppiness, negligence, or even coercion from superiors or peers, teachers often use test prep not intending to cheat, but the researchers lay out a clear case that teaching to a specific test is a form of “involuntary cheating.”
I see it all the time when I am supervising student teachers. I have spent weeks, months and years teaching my students how to teach English at he middle and secondary level, and then when I go in to observe them teach during their practicums, and they are doing test prep. They do this because the schools where they do their practicums require them to do this.
I try to explain that test prep is not a sound teaching practice, but the schools where they do their student teaching seem to think that test prep, like teaching to the test, is either good teaching or a necessary evil. I agree with Amrein-Beardsley, Berliner and Rideau. It is cheating.
Here are 16 reasons why teachers shouldn’t do it:
1. There is no credible evidence that test prep improves test scores.
I believe that the purpose of creating these high stakes tests over the past 20 years was not to transform public schools into test preparation factories. The policy-makers who wrote the legislation that led to these tests, the academics who advised those policy-makers and the school leaders who are following their lead have no intention of creating tests to which good teachers would teach instead of teaching real curriculum. There may have been some capitalists who seized on the opportunity to make a buck, and they may have intentionally created texts and technologies designed to prepare children for these tests, those who are responsible for the creation and implementation of these tests did not intend to have test prep replace good teaching, but it has. And it has happened as an unintended consequence. School committees, superintendents, curriculum directors and principals as well as other school personnel push teachers to use test prep strategies in their classrooms, especially during the years when test are given. Sadly, this may be shortsighted, because there is no proof that teaching-to-the-test helps school children do well on those tests.
2. Students learn fewer reading, writing and thinking skills and less content when we allow test prep to edge out real teaching.
Because students spend so much time getting ready for tests, they don’t spend meaningful time on reading and writing skills. Literacy research shows that the cognitive skills required to improve interpretive and expressive language abilities are reduced when teachers focus their lessons on preparing for high stakes tests.
3. Test Prep makes students hate school.
There is significant research that shows children like school less since this testing movement started in the 1990s. Yes, they hate the tests, of course, but the tests are not school. They dislike school more now, because classwork is now more about getting ready for these tests, which bores some children and makes others nervous, than It is about learning academic skills or about subject matter knowledge.
4. Test Prep is a form of cheating.
And, teaching children to cheat, corrupts their understanding of intellectual work. Instead of developing critical thinkers who can cognitively process information and problem solve, we are training children how to game the system.
5. Students learn that failure is bad.
Failure is necessary for learning, both individual learning and societal learning. Without making mistakes, there is no education. In fact, most of the world’s greatest discoveries, inventions and theories started out as mistakes. But Test Prep demonizes getting things wrong, because these tests are high stakes. So, students are discouraged from intellectual risk-taking as a result. They become conservative thinkers who go with the practical option rather than one that might lead to an epiphany. The president can’t admit his mistakes, which is one of the reasons why he never learns.
6. Students learn a reductionist approach to complex subjects like literature.
Teachers frequently site the test itself as a reason for learning specific skills. Instead of learning how to write so they can communicate, express and articulate their ideas, many teachers say skills must be learned so that students can get a high score on the test.
7. Test Prep causes anxiety for students and teachers.
Teachers I supervise who are told to do test prep, mention the name of the high stakes test multiple times during each class meeting. The name of the test becomes the single most mentioned thing that their students experience, the nature of “high stakes” is drilled into students. Some teachers do a daily countdown to the test date. Students become scared. The number of diagnosed anxiety disorders, the increase in the number or pharmaceuticals prescribed to children for anxiety and depression and the reported levels of antisocial behavior have increased in direct proportion to the testing regiment over the past 20 years in public education. Research in working conditions for teachers also finds correlations between the testing movement and diagnosable medical conditions like anxiety and depression. Some studies suggest that more teachers leave the profession because of anxiety over testing regimes than for any other reason. And, now the experts are pushing social and emotional learning? I wonder why we need that? Fear is a serious performance inhibitor. I’ll never understand why teachers do this.
8. Test Prep is a violation of Campbell’s Law.
When Donald Campbell wrote Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change in 1976 for The Public Affairs Center at Dartmouth College he couldn’t have imagined what was coming. A psychologist and social scientist who wrote about research methods, Campbell, is known for having said: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” In his seminal paper, he wrote about the conditions under which unintended negative consequences occur when there is an attempt to solve a problem, like low educational attainment. He points out that, sometimes the impact is that the solution makes the problem worse. This is known as Campbell’s Law.
Campbell wrote: “Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”
The unintended and unanticipated negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms most often takes the form of teaching-to-the-test or even outright cheating. If Campbell, who politely discussed this phenomena in 1976 could see us now, he would be outraged.
As renowned testing expert and trained psychometrician, Dr. Daniel Koretz, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, states in his 2008 book, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, the way to undermine the value of a test is to teach to it. This consequently measures the preparation instead of the education experience. A student’s performance on such a test can no longer be representative of a domain of knowledge, which is what the test is supposed to be designed for.
Teaching time is shifted away from subjects that are not on the test to those that are. The curriculum becomes narrowed and many subjects and skills that are not easily tested, lose their value in the education community where the test is administered. Koretz contends that increases in state test scores over time, which policymakers and some educators like to take credit for, are often related mostly to score inflation, which amounts to a false reading. This is especially the case as Campbell points out when the test scores have heavy consequences for the professionals who work in school districts. Score inflation is simply an illusion of education progress.
The mathematical complexities of testing have been ignored by policymakers since before the late 90s, because the testing regime benefits their politics and the psychometrics are complex. When we apply the concepts of Campbell’s Law to The Obama administration’s program of Race to the Top or The Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, we see that high-stakes testing like MCAS and PARCC do not improve educational outcomes. Their effect is toxic to schools, to good teaching and to learning.
9. Test Prep creates classroom management problems.
Because test prep is not inherently interesting, because the purpose of it is not to help students become life long learners, and because it is teacher-centered, students become disengaged, distracted and eventually disruptive. In order to complete a lesson in how to answer an open response question, a multiple choice question or a long composition question correctly, a teacher must FORCE students to comply with directions during the lesson. This requires a heavy hand. Teachers must use bribes and punishments as well as an overly dominant presence in the classroom to get students to comply with test prep.
This dynamic creates a power struggle between those students who are leaders or rebels and their teachers. Such conflict becomes the focus on the class instead of the academic goals. The teacher’s attempt to control the class during the test prep also interrupts his or her attempts to build rapport with students, to establish trust and to develop relationship that leads to real skill attainment.
Classes that I observe in local schools when supervising practicums for the university, where test prep is the norm, have significantly more disruptions than those that do not, regardless of the socio-economic status of a community, regardless of the academic level of the class and regardless of the age of the students. Even the most dynamic, creative, experienced, smart and hardworking teachers, struggle with managing student behavior during class when they must do test prep. They experience more frequent disruptions, see more students who are distracted and need to apply more force. The most talented English teachers have their creative hands tied when it comes to curriculum. They are forced to do test prep by their bosses, and they force their students to do this work. The act becomes more about compliance than learning. The curriculum is narrowed, and their repertoire of best practices is reduced.
10. Test Prep is an extreme form of outcome-focused thinking that distracts students from important cognitive processes.
This impedes inquiry-based-learning. It limits students to only the outcomes that the test can measured on the test, which are ultimately simplistic and rudimentary, like memorizing. The more higher-ordered the thinking, the less likely it is to be on the test, so why teach something that’s not on the test? There’s no point in that, right?
11. Test Prep fosters dependency.
Because Test Prep has at its origin authority figures and power structures built upon agency and hierarchies, students learn that school is about power and not about curiosity, wonder and understanding. They learn to look to adults for answers and expect to be fed them. They learn not to question someone’s or their own thinking and don’t know how to evaluate their own work.
12. Test Prep is teacher-centered.
Test Prep requires teachers to “run” class, to be at the heart of ever activity, because students would never freely choose to do Test Prep. Therefore, teaching using Test Prep is always teacher-centered. It’s forced and top down.
13. Test Prep replaces the teaching of great works of art, science and literature.
Test Prep can’t honor the brilliance of the best works of art, literature, science and history, because the tests do not have the time or ability to measure contexts, nor do they have the space to include the entire works. For example, students are more likely to be taught about The Origin of Species or to be taught about The Declaration of Independence or to be taught about Hamlet than to actually read and unpack them. Why? Because the test doesn’t include whole works. It only excerpts these works. As a result, education becomes one excerpt after another. It’s all pieces, never whole.
14. Test Prep reduces the teaching of skills to formulaic thinking.
Formulas are helpful when teachers must scaffold learning, but eventually those frames must be removed to finish the process. Test Prep holds formulaic thinking up as thinking per se. And model processes become hallmarks instead of examples. And, the models are oversimplified as time goes on. As a result, students never learn to create their own mental processes.
15. Test Prep creates dualistic thinking.
When questions have only right or wrong answers instead of complex, sophisticated and nuanced cognitive processes, children learn to see the world as black and white, right or wrong. They cannot tolerate the chaos of grey. They cannot assimilate information that does not fit into a binary. Test prep perpetrates this type of thinking. No wonder people are so intolerant. They are being conditioned as such.
16. Test Prep focuses students’ and teachers’ goals on survival rather than conceptual understandings.
In one ELA class I recently observed in a school near Lowell where students were being prepped for an upcoming high stakes test, students asked questions:
•How much time do we get to do the test?
•Can we use a dictionary during the test?
•When is the test?
•If we are absent during the test, what happens?
•What happens if we fail the test?
•What is a passing score on the test?
•Does spelling count on the test?
•How do you think I will do on it?
•Where will the test be?
•Is it going to be like a normal test I would have in this class or more like a midterm?
Instead of asking questions about the novel they recently read, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they asked questions about the test. It became the focus rather than the literature or what students could learn from reading that novel. Instead of asking Why is Huck sometimes mean to Jim? Or Are Huck and Jim friends? The students asked questions only about the test. In an entire fifty-minute class period neither the teacher nor the students asked about, discussed or wrote about what the novel meant. They did not discuss what the author’s intent might have been, what students thought the book was about. They never discussed the dynamics of the characters’ relationships, the symbolism in the book, the implications of the book for the time it was written or the overarching themes in the novel. Students didn’t ask what specific words meant. They didn’t discuss the language. And, the teacher didn’t ask students to openly discuss, write about or respond to in any way the motivations of the characters in the novel or Twain’s motivations for writing it.
Instead, the teacher walked students through a formulaic step by step process for how to answer specific kinds of questions that are typically seen on the high stakes test. One type of question is called an “open response” question. But, from how these questions were discussed in one class I observed, there was nothing open about these questions. I watched as students worked in pairs trying to dissect generic prompts that they might see on a high stakes test they would take months from then. The teachers was required to design a routine for answering these “open response” test questions correctly. Then, she directed students to use her pre-designed instructions for how to formulate a well worded first sentence to their answers as well as how to find, and quote text from he novel that represents evidence for their thinking.
Most of the students were not thinking. Some were literally scratching their heads, waiting for the teacher to tell them “the right answer,” which she did without exploring what the students thought good evidence might have been. They asked many questions, because they didn’t want to be wrong. She told them the answer without exploring their thinking, because she didn’t want them to be wrong either.
Some students did not do the work, talking about things unrelated. They may have been disinterested in the activity because they did not value the test. Maybe some thought they could pass the test without this preparation or maybe some resented it’s lack of relevance to their lives. Certainly, they were not authentically stimulated by this training, unless they were stimulated by a fear they might fail and not graduate.
Fear is a motivation is stimulated the amygdala, a part of the brain that is trained to help us respond to survival situation, not to intellectual pursuits. Both teachers and students are supposed to fear the high stakes tests. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be high stakes.
Some students compliantly worked hard plowing through the packet of instructions, answering questions, following directions and checking to see if the were right. But, they learned little more than how to pass the test. They were not reading the book. They were not writing about it or anything else, not in an authentic way. And, they were not discussing what the book meant, what they felt about it or why it is important.
And some other students rushed through the assignment, finishing as early as possible so they could do something else.
I teach teachers, so I feel a bit guilty saying don’t do test prep. It’s bad, knowing that they will have to do it, if their bosses make them. So, if you are a teacher, and you must do test prep, then don’t do these. These are the worst:
•teaching formulaic thinking by teaching things like the five paragraph essay. It will make you students into bad writers and it won’t ultimately help them score higher on the test.
•trying to predict what will be on the test and then basing your lessons and text selection on those predictions. Even if you are right about your prediction (which is not likely) basing your test prep on this type of outcome will not increase your students test scores.
•counting down to MCAS or whatever they call it. In my travels to dozens of schools in my consulting work and my practicum supervision, I have witnessed teachers intentionally running “count downs” to the day of the test. Counting down to the holidays, to graduation or the homecoming game are all harmless, but MCAS is not Christmas! And, doing this will most definitely HURT your students’ performance on MCAS by increasing their anxiety. Anxiety is a significant performance inhibitor on tests. It will decrease test scores and encourage an association between your class and a feeling of fear.
•teaching vocabulary in isolation. 50 years of research in vocabulary instruction has concluded that this does not help children to learn vocabulary. It simply is a waste of time for 99% of children, and it won’t help raise anyone’s test scores.
•say over and over the name of the test to scare students into getting ready. For example, a local school I work in refers to tenth grade as “the high stakes year.” That is not productive. It will lower their scores and their interest in learning. Your boss might say it. Other teachers might say it too. Even the students might be conditioned to say it, but I would avoid saying the name of the test at all, if possible.
•use practice tests from previous years. Most students will immediately and right in front of your eyes, disengage from learning. They will hate school, and it’s almost impossible to learn when you hate school. They will probably hate you too. And there is no evidence to show that this raises test scores. None.
So, what should teachers do instead?
Well, you can teach! For God’s sake, teach instead of doing test prep.
•allow students to read books they like independently DURING class.
•allow students to choose their own books.
•allow students to write during class.
•allow students to do math in class.
•show them how to do research.
•work with them on projects that help them think critically.
•conduct experiments.
•theorize, explore, articulate ideas and discuss issues.
•model for them how to argue well.
•describe, define, compare, analyze and evaluate things, information and experiences.
•explore, create, invent and design things, text and art.
•make connections between ideas, facts and thoughts.
Teach your students how to think, and they WILL do ok on the test. In the meantime, you get to do your job instead of scaring children, instead of oversimplifying and narrowing the curriculum and conspiring to perpetrate a degree of cheating for generations of children.