Testing takes time and resources. And it has an effect on the testee (Holy Heisenberg!). Is it worth it? Looking at this example calls that into question — as do the concerns raised further down in the article.
Yes, again, it's useful to measure status / progress. But academic knowlege is not some sort of Platonic ideal where we expect everyone to know certain answers in lockstep. I understand the frustration of wanting to know if schools as a whole or teachers specifically are doing a good job — but it's also important to consider the frustration of tests that disrupt classroom routine and don't actually connect to the students who are being tested.
A teacher’s troubling account of giving a 106-question standardized test to 11 year olds
Here’s the step-by-step deconstruction of how she gave the test and how her kids reacted.
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Just nitpicking from an otherwise interesting article : is the test culturaly biased ? Well of course it is. Without the underlying culture, language is not much more than a glorified pidgin. I remember spending 8 years in high school learning english (aged between 10 and 18), I graduated with flying colors, and I realised all of a sudden that in spite of having travelled in the USA and England, I couldn't properly read a basic novel ! Yes, that's true, I could shop at a grocery, talk about business, computing, news, etc., with english speaking persons, but I couldn't for the life of me read a basic book.
20 years later, on the one hand I certainly wouldn't be able to ace my english test anymore because I don't speak the language on a regular basis, therefore I write a lot of grammar horrors, but on the other hand, I feel much more fluent because I forced myself to read a lot of english classics (including the Beowulf), listen to lullabies (not knowing the lullabies of a language you want to master is a show stopper – references to nursery rhymes are creeping litteraly everywhere), and I memorised by rote countless idiomatics.
Today I can read most books in english as I would read in french. But I had to delve really deep into the culture before being able to do so.
The problem is, it seems to me, +Manuel Viet, that the problem of common cultural references is different from the problem of fundamental education or even the problem of being able to learn. The cultural bias in some of the questions is such that not getting the answer correct doesn't tell you what the underlying cause really is (is it because nobody in the area calls a dresser / chest of drawers a "bureau" or because the school doesn't teach vocabulary at all or because the kids are cognitively challenged).
And, as noted, that's only part of the problem here.