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Educational institutions around the world have been using standardized tests

游客2024-11-06  5
问题    Educational institutions around the world have been using standardized tests to evaluate the performance of students. However, there has been an ongoing debate among scholars, parents, and teachers on the effectiveness of these tests. What are your views on standardized tests? Read the following excerpt carefully and write your response in NO LESS THAN 300 WORDS, in which you should:
   1.   summarize briefly the different opinions;
   2.   give your comment.
   Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
   Write your article on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
   Excerpt
   Peter: The multiple-choice format that is used on standardized tests is an inadequate assessment tool. It encourages a simplistic way of thinking in which there are only right and wrong answers, which doesn’t apply in real-world situations. The format is also biased toward male students, who, studies have shown, adapt themselves more easily to the game-like point scoring of multiple-choice questions.
   Richard: Teacher-graded assessments are inadequate alternatives to standardized tests because they are subjectively scored and unreliable. Most teachers are not trained in testing and measurement, and research has shown many teachers only consider non-cognitive outcomes, including class participation, perceived effort, and progress over the period of the course, which are irrelevant to subject-matter mastery.
   Ruth: The multiple-choice format used on standardized tests produces accurate information necessary to assess and improve American schools. According to the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, multiple-choice questions can provide highly reliable test scores and an objective measurement of student achievement. Today’s multiple-choice tests are more sophisticated than their predecessors. The Center for Public Education, a national public school advocacy group, says many multiple-choice tests now require considerable thought, even notes and calculations, before choosing a bubble.
   Charles: While our understanding of the brain and how people learn and think has progressed enormously, standardized tests have remained the same. Test makers still assume that knowledge can be broken into separate bits and that people learn by absorbing these individual parts. Today, cognitive and developmental psychologists understand that knowledge is not separable bits and that people (including children) learn by connecting what they already know with what they are trying to learn. If they cannot actively make meaning out of what they are doing, they do not learn or remember.
   Valerie; Standardized tests measure only a small portion of what makes education meaningful. According to late education researcher Gerald W. Bracey, qualities that standardized tests cannot measure include creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity.
   Sam: China has a long tradition of standardized testing and leads the world in educational achievement. China displaced Finland as number one in reading, math, and science when Shanghai debuted on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings in 2009. Despite calls for a reduction in standardized testing, China’s testing regimen remains firm in place. Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Chairman of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, predicts that Chinese cities will top the PISA charts for the next several decades.
选项
答案    My View on Standardized Tests
   The effectiveness of standardized tests has long been a contentious issue. Many countries including China are now mostly depending on standardized tests to assess students because multiple-choice questions are accurate, reliable and objective. However, some critics think such tests cannot keep up with the social advancement because they cannot fully reflect candidates’ performance. What’s more, the multiple-choice questions examine students’ mastery of fragmentary knowledge. This way of learning is in conflict with cognitive and developmental theory.
   It goes without saying that standardized tests play an important role in assessing students’ achievement. Such tests have achieved significant, sustained and widespread gains on different national and international assessments. Take China’s College Entrance Examination as an example. Every year, nearly 10 million high school students take the exam. Standardized tests not only save time and cost, but can well differentiate students, and more importantly, give every candidate a fair shot. Some people criticize that such tests are ordeals to both teachers and learners because they restrict educators, stifle innovation in the classroom and take the joy out of teaching. However, the study has shown that this is a false assumption for most teachers are not simply telling students how to make the answers correct but they spend more time analyzing the reasons, and consequently, the fundamental knowledge will become a part of students’ inner mind. In other words, standardized testing is a tool instead of a focus.
   However, to assess students is not a simple multiple-choice game. The purpose of education is to foster all-round talents with critical thinking, innovative mind and problem-solving abilities. Therefore, standardized tests are far from catering to such purposes. If we want to create an educational system which is able to adapt flexibly to the rapid changes ahead, we ought to rethink the way we use standardized tests or the way to improve such tests rather than simply opting out of it.
解析    本题关注与学生学习息息相关的标准化考试。题目要求首先简要概括各方观点，然后发表自己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生需要首先归纳概括材料中的不同观点。在之后的论述过程中，应围绕自己的观点进行集中论述，阐述标准化考试的局限性，以增强论述的全面性和说服力。在论述过程中，应注意适当使用连接词，以增强文章的连贯性。
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