Because It’s on the Test…²¹
Teaching To the Test: What Every Educator and Policy-Maker Should Know²²

“I hope that “Because it’s on the test” will someday be erased from our professional conversations” (DeWitt)

“Not surprisingly, the singular focus on standardized testing and the increased prevalence of teaching to the test resulted in an unhappy teaching staff that began questioning their suitability for the profession” (Volante)

Peter DeWitt, in his article Because It’s on the Test, argues against high-stakes testing and rejects the teacher pedagogy of ‘teaching to the test’. DeWitt acknowledges the detrimental effects of such testing, describing how it creates student disengagement in schools:  “teachers spend weeks upon weeks providing worksheets that are mind numbingly boring to students…we see students who loved school until they realized they were in a grade that came with tests.”²¹  DeWitt, however, focuses mainly on how testing negatively influences teacher pedagogy.

In his article, Teaching to the Test: What Every Educator and Policy-Maker Should Know, Louis Volante focuses on the negative repercussions that stem from ‘teaching to the test’, providing guidelines for constructive test preparation. Volante discusses the “maladaptive preparation strategies that may accompany high-stakes testing measures,” adversely affecting students.²² 

Acknowledging the harmful effects of high-stakes tests on students, DeWitt contends that the bigger issue is actually the effect such testing has on adults and teachers. He argues that “high stakes testing has shifted the focus of the adults from good pedagogy to preparing students for what will be on the test,”²¹ drawing on the example of keyboarding to support his point. DeWitt describes his prior experience at a teacher conference, where panelists were discussing issues in education. Two of the panelists “brought up the importance of keyboarding because…high stakes testing will be computer-based [and] they believed that children need to learn how to keyboard because it [would] help them perform better on the test.”²¹ DeWitt took issue with the fact that the panel of teachers assumed keyboarding was important because it could better test scores, and that the discussion “did not revolve around good pedagogy or teaching students how to use a keyboard properly because it would help them write stories…it focused on the importance of test prep and test taking.”²¹

“We need to opt out of the thinking that we should only teach something because it will appear on a test. The more we make the tests the center of our conversation, and the reason we teach curriculum, the more the tests become the case for teaching and learning, and good pedagogy gets shoved to some dark corner” (DeWitt)

Volante argues that many teachers “employ test preparation practices that are clearly not in the best interest of children… [such as] relentless drilling on test content, eliminating important curricular content not covered by the test, and providing interminably long practice sessions.”²² These strategies of teaching to the test serve to ‘dumb down’ teaching, harm overall basic learning, and narrow the curriculum, thus alienating many students. Both DeWitt and Volante appeal to teachers and administrators to stop ‘teaching to the test’, as it only harms all individuals involved.

“Individual teachers and schools can demonstrate their effectiveness without focusing heavily on standardized testing or resorting to teaching to the test techniques” (Volante)

DeWitt ends by speaking directly to teachers: “We know that there are better ways to assess student learning, and when our best reason for teaching something is that it appears on a high stakes test, we should probably reflect on that, and decide on a more positive pedagogical reason as we move forward.”²¹