Kids and Stress

~ Laura

From the New York Times:

Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future. As more school districts strive for accountability, standardized tests have proliferated. The pressure to do well on achievement tests for college is filtering its way down to lower grades, so that even third graders feel as if they are on trial. Students get the message that class work isn’t what counts, and that the standardized exam is the truer measure. Sure, you did your homework and wrote a great history report — but this test is going to find out how smart you really are. Critics argue that all this test-taking is churning out sleep-deprived, overworked, miserable children.

Published by Laura

6 thoughts on “Kids and Stress”

  1. On the days when there’s standardized testing, kids don’t have homework beyond just being fed and rested, generally speaking, That means that a standardized testing day is in some ways less stressful and less work than a normal day.

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  2. You’ve picked an interesting quote given that the article talks about the benefits of stress and teaching kids how to accept the stress and use it to their advantage.
    I think we as a society have to ask why we have implemented accountability tests. Is it because we have failed some of our kids because they happen to born into poorer families? The wrong neighborhood? Perhaps if we looked into changing the funding formulas for education, we could end up providing better schooling for all our children.

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  5. “I’m less interested in how people cope with stress and more interested in why we have created this insanity.”
    I like tests, in their place. That place is not high stakes testing (as in the Taiwanese tests, where the outcome of a single test weeds out 60% of the students from future educational opportunities). That place is also not testing that is so frequent that it disrupts the school year so much that it interferes with teaching.
    But tests used to test whether children have learned something? I think they are vital, and without them, we won’t really know whether children have learned (and, furthermore, the children won’t really know whether they’ve learned), about a number of subjects (declarative knowledge — i.e. facts, math, methods and problems, . . . ). I don’t know enough about writing to understand how we test how well its been learned.
    Also, the problem with homework and your great history report as the alternative is whether you did it, or it reflects someone else’s learning; and, those alternative assessments stress different learning skills, i.e. planning, executive functioning, etc., which may also poorly assess learning in some children.
    Finally, I completely deny the idea that “Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future.” That’s just crazy talk. In the old days, admission to the Ivy’s depended just on tests, no? In other countries one’s whole future was mapped out on the basis of tests. It is simply and absolutely untrue that tests mean more for children’s future than they used to in many other periods in history.

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  6. I would say there are two ways in which the stress of these tests impact students. On the low end, in inner city schools, for example, the kids know that their performance on the tests impacts the school. If they do poorly, the school closes, or their teacher gets fired. Schools convey that message. The best schools mitigate that, but when the school is under pressure, it often translates to the students.
    At the high end, students (and parents) often take the tests as an indication of intelligence or whether or not they’re going to get into Princeton in 10 years. Ivies still look at tests, but more importantly, they look at grades and portfolios. There are tests that determine grades. And students know that those tests can mean the difference between and A and a B, between Harvard and a state school. I’ve seen students involved in 50 activities to build the portfolio and then not have time for school work and then their grades suffer.
    Testing is just the beginning of students being aware that they’re being judged based on a single performance. How is that conducive to learning? And how fair is it that what happens in school, when students are growing and maturing and going to make mistakes, determines so much of their futures? Students know that. They internalize it in different ways, and it definitely stresses them out.

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