Standardized testing results in education: good or overemphasized?

I recently saw an article in The Age which has criticized the alleged overemphasis of the NAPLAN, the national standardized test for math and English over Australia for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 [Official quits at school's test results spike]. This prompted me to write this essay.



There is no doubt that Australia could do with an increase in literacy and numeracy standards of school pupils. One only has to look at the results of TIMSS to find that Australians do not perform close to the top nations in these areas. Standardized tests are used widely around the world to measure performance in areas. They are a benchmark, with results of people able to be easily compared with one another. As such, they can provide meaningful comparisons between different people who do the same test.

Since standardized tests enable meaningful comparisons, they should be used in education. In the case of Dallas Primary School, they saw an increase in scores for the NAPLAN. The most obvious conclusion, therefore, is that the quality of the students' math and literacy skills has increased. The use of the standardized test has given us a relatively objective measure of this.

However, detractors may argue that the test has been overemphasized. Particularly, that students are trained "just to do well in the test". But this should not be an issue, if the test is written well. If the test covers good math and literacy skills in great detail and depth, then an increase in scores indicates an increase in student ability. Therefore, virtually all the training for students "just to do well in the test" would have the effect of increasing math and literacy skills; the wanted outcome, with the remaining small amount devoted to exam strategy which will become important later on as students move into higher education.

How would you explain a spike in data though? Well, to me, there is no good reason why a real increase in math and literacy skills of the students isn't a good explanation. Two years is a long time, and the students can learn a lot in this time. Especially considering how low Australian math standards are, there is no good reason why students cannot catch up in two years. Of course, there could be other effects too though; more than 30% of people did not sit the test and they could have been low performers. However, a lot of these were excluded due to arriving in Australia for only a short time, and the departmental investigation found no artificial inflation from exclusion from the school. Then again, it's also possible that this is a freak result. We'll find out after the results come out this year. But that doesn't invalidate the test.

As for the "world's best practice" alluded to in the article? Well, just look at the TIMSS results. It seems like the "world's best practice" of numeracy and literacy standards is found in East Asian nations and countries like Singapore. And our Australian performance is not even close! It's not rocket science here, it's not as if we're at the top of the game. If you want "world's best practice", then learn from them. That's what we should be doing.

Standardized testing and aiming to improve upon benchmarks is a great way to increase our literacy and math standards. It is perhaps the only objective way to note improvement. If the test is written well, then most increases in scores would mean increases in real math and literacy skills. However, if the test is not sound, then it should be improved. But they should not be dispensed with completely.