You know, as a teacher, I have no problem with testing. I certainly wouldn’t advocate an anti-testing line of thinking in my own practice.

I think what I have noticed in our systems, however, is the propensity to spend a great deal of classroom time on things that we know will be tested. This has sidelined so many important curriculum areas, and this is a concern to me.

Stephen, could you clarify please ..

What’s the problem with spending classroom time on things that are being tested?
Are you saying that what’s being tested are not the most important things?

Or are you saying that the amount of time is way too large? In which case the obvious question would be: why does it take so much time to teach these things?

Sure, I’ll clarify. In Ontario, annual tests of math and literacy are the norm. Most PD initiatives from the districts must carry with them connections to better test scores. Most curriculum focus in our schools is designed to raise test scores.

I have no problem in admitting that math and literacy should take up a large percentage of classroom time, but areas that are important on their own, and in that they can provide a rich context for applying math and literacy skills, are receiving less attention.

Areas that I feel need more attention: science!!!! History and Geography (now, more than ever before) and The Arts. (The recommended arts time expenditure in our district for the Arts is 80 minutes per week.)

Place this against the fact that in the last number of years, we haven’t seen a great deal of improvement in test scores, then you should have people asking some important questions here.

This just printed yesterday in the NYTimes. A bit of a double-edged sword.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/world/asia/30shanghai.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

I should say that the article referenced in my last comment is a little one-sided. A read of the OECD report on the PISA results for China provides a more balanced approach to looking at the scores.

If I may add a little twist to this discussion - the whole analogy doesn’t work, unless you believe students are totally passive.  The pig being weighed contributes nothing to the process.  However, if the pig, knowing he was going to be weighed every day decided to engage in the process and ate an extra five pounds (sorry 2,3KG) of feed every night - then weighing the pig would fatten it.

The gem of the testing process is not in the writing of the test, but in the student’s preparation for it.  The learning comes in the review - and most people will not do extra work without a real incentive - the test.  I’ve never heard this analogy in my time in front of the blackboard, and hope to God to never hear it again.  Maybe it’s because our PD seems to center around being better citizens.

Well Stephen, I agree with you that we should be asking some important questions here.
If indeed there is so much time spent on literacy and basic math that it crowds out all the other subjects then something is fundamentally wrong.
I still think that literacy and math need to take priority over everything else other then phys ed - which in my opinion is fundamental for health - because you can’t have students learning science in a fundamental way if they don’t know math and similarly history and geography would be difficult for students that don’t read and write well.
From what I hear, I’m not at all sure that there is so much time spent on literacy and basic math. The amount of time seems to be the decision of each teacher and it seems to vary greatly.
Secondly, time spent on the subject does not necessarily mean time well spent. If out of one class of 45 minutes a student is on his own 30 minutes in my opinion he is not learning much.
So I think it comes back to the teaching methods, quality of the curriculum and textbooks and quality of teacher training.
Learning to read and write well and learning basic math should not take more than one class ( one hour)  every day each for a total of two hours a day which should leave plenty of time for other subjects.

I totally agree with you that geography and history are important to being a complete human being and a good citizen. By the way second biggest cultural shock in addition to people not able to compute change because they “are not good at math” was the almost total ignorance about world geography.
(Shall I also add the inability of managing in French even though everybody studies it for at least 8 years in school and French being one of Canada’s official languages?)

What does a young person understand from the news if he can’t pinpoint the middle east on the map or if he doesn’t know where the major water and natural resources are?
What kind of citizens is he going to be?

Regarding testing, while I think having the grade 3 and 6 tests is a step forward because it has re-established testing, I don’t think they are the right kind of tests.
First of all, because of their nature grading them is very open to interpretation, secondly, the results cannot be compared from one year to another.
So we cannot reliably say whether a higher percentage at levels 3 and 4 this year is indeed a statistically significant improvement.
We need the kind of tests that allow us to compare data from one year to other years.

It’s not the weighing the pig that makes the difference but what you do with that information. If farmer A in your example just weighs the pig, then the pig will not be any heavier, it is attention to the results and the subsequent action he takes afterward that makes the difference.

If you assess students to find out what they know, and then do nothing with that information (which is almost exactly what is done with standardized testing because of the delay between students taking the test and the results being returned to the school).

We use what we call formative assessment at our school where we very regularly and in a variety of different ways, assess what students know and are able to do, and then act on that information.