In the second of this three-part series Dr Christopher Thurber, PhD, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, United States, and Nick Fair, Westminster School, London, England, United Kingdom, take a look at:
Standardised testing, student mental health, and the future of boarding schools
Crackpot or In part one of this three-part series, we discussed the
significantly as they moved
students have low levels of
emphasis on standardised testing. Here in part two, we
Stage 3, the transition from
don’t know what to do when
deleterious consequences of contemporary education’s turn our attention to qualitative assessments that are less deleterious to students’ mental, emotional, and social health (MESH).
Quantitative backdraft
The fact that frequent assessment may lower students’
pleasure in learning is akin to digging up young vegetables in the spring to check whether their roots are healthy. You get data but also perturb the organism; performed too
frequently, you stunt its growth or worse. Said differently, test scores are not benign; they either buttress or dismantle
students’ perceptions of their own efficacy. They provide
valuable, but circumscribed, information that, when given too much importance or administered too frequently, becomes iatrogenic. In other words, the assessments inadvertently harm some of the people they were designed to help. Widespread testing has, like university admissions
competition, motivated entrepreneurs. Private standardised test tutors and for-profit summer test-prep programs have proliferated. Here, too, we find iatrogenic effects. Although
expensively prepared students realize higher test scores, they also realize that numbers matter more than creativity,
kindness, or comradery. Worse still is the gradual fixing of
their mindsets as highly competent in certain domains and perpetually mediocre in others.
In a study conducted at the University of Bristol (Broadfoot, et al, 2004), researchers found that students’ views of their effectiveness and confidence as learners dropped
from Key Stage 2 to Key
primary to secondary school. This finding is particularly
resilience and they often
they don’t know what to do.
troubling alongside a study
Dweck is also well-known for
Stanford University, in which
that mindset matters. When
conducted by Carol Dweck at a mixed-ability group of
students was given a maths test that took the form of a
booklet of problems (1999). Some of the students were given the booklet with
problems inserted in the middle that were nearly
impossible to solve; other students were given the booklet without these
harder questions. Dweck
observed that students with the hard problems in the middle of the test did
significantly worse on
subsequent questions within their range of ability,
compared to those who had worked on the standard
booklet. The sub-group most
affected by the experience of extreme challenge was highachieving girls. In other
words, some high-achieving
her research demonstrating students are told that
questions are problems
rather than puzzles and that results will be scored rather than discussed, their
performance drops. Findings
like this leave one wondering what happens when schools, exam companies, and many families implicitly frame a
standardized test as one of
the most important indicator of a young person’s competence.
