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Final exams for kindergartners

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45 pointsColinWright57 comments

In India, we've had testing since forever, for kids of every age, even to get into kindergarten.

My understanding is that this is normal in pretty much every East Asian country: HK, China, Korea, Japan. I don't think the education systems in any of these countries can really be considered any worse than any other system, and arguably has churned out way more talented and driven people to contribute to humanity.

I am personally anti-test myself, but what is a better option? Someone suggested "lottery", but that idea makes me shudder, as possibly the only option worse than testing. In an ideal world, every student can be accommodated in the learning ecosystem, and we don't require a standardized metric to figure out if a student should advance to the next level. We would also pace what they're being taught to their competencies and give each student personalized learning and testing material.

But we are nowhere near being able to do that, from a resource management, personalization design, evaluation or teacher training perspective (anywhere in the world). I have spent much time thinking about this, and I can't come up with a better idea for fairly allocating our education resources for places with ridiculously large number of students, and for evaluating the progress of the partakers of that resource (current students). That is, at least until we invest heavily in researching how to better evaluate students and identify the right metrics to measure and measure them well.

> In an ideal world, every student can be accommodated in the learning ecosystem, and we don't require a standardized metric to figure out if a student should advance to the next level.

I live in an ideal world, then. In my country (PT), education is free and mandatory for 12 years. After the 9th grade, students do their first selection of objective in their student careers. It's here that they are given the choice between technical course or a track oriented towards university. They then study three more years and either proceed to the workforce, to Bsc degrees (3 years) or to Msc degrees (5 years).

University, while not free, is not expensive. Tuition is about a thousand euros per year. Even so, we have some of the highest tuition in Europe.

Of course, there are dropouts, and some of them economically motivated. It's a problem being worked on. Dropout rate (students not completing the 12 years of mandatory school) was 50% in the 90s, is now below 20% and dropping.

It follows that your assessment that we are nowhere near being able to provide education to all of society is plain wrong, at least in Western countries.

>In an ideal world, every student can be accommodated in the learning ecosystem[...]We would also pace what they're being taught to their competencies and give each student personalized learning and testing material[...]But we are nowhere near being able to do that

I only did up to my first year of high school in the US but there is something like this with AP classes. This is especially prevalent in Math, where the year in which people would start Algebra would vary from 6th grade to 9th grade. You could be paced based off of your level.

I remember moving to France after 9th grade and realising that I already knew basically everything that would be taught to me for the rest of high school in Math, because I was able to have such a head-start thanks to my pre-AP Math classes.

I think that shows that the American HS system is in fact well adapted to fast learners, as well as accommodating to slower people (the bar could be set pretty low for the baseline classes because the strongest students were in different classes).

A corollary to this is that the standardised testing was a joke to the set of students who were in the advanced classes. The biggest waste of time ever.

I only experienced Northern Texas' version of this, and from what I heard my understanding is that most school districts in the US could not afford to run programs like this. Thinking back on it, I'm pretty sure Texas has a really good educational system (the results compared to other states are really pretty good considering that Texas is the 4th poorest state in the union).

This has been the opposite of my experience. The US school system is extremely inhibitive to fast learners. Everything is on a curriculum, and it's really difficult to get around the bureaucracy to get ahead.

I was homeschooled/self-taught since the 2nd grade until about high school when I started attending community college full-time. At that point I was about "even" with my best friend, who is also considered very intelligent. I was then able to pick which semester-long classes to take. For example, I was taking third year calculus my sophomore year, a full year before he was able to take Calc 1. And this was no discrepancy due to ability. (for those curious I applied to colleges at the 'regular' time and am now attending a 4-year institution without transferring any of my credits).

The fact of the matter is that the American public school system wasn't developed with education in mind, and now functions more as crowd control than as an educational institution.

This experience seems to stem from lack of funding, and schools not having access to AP classes.

I know I was extremely lucky to be in a school district with funding, I had access to loads of college credit-level classes thanks to that.

> but what is a better option?

More educational resources.

We didn't have marks until the third grade( age 9-10 ). Until then you only had written observation from the teacher about your behavior and development.

There were no tests or pressure. We were very carefree.

Near the end of the article, according to state Senator David Simmons:

    Simmons said all that the law requires is for a teacher to sit down with a kindergartener and ask about what he or she learned.

    “To assure each one of those children is helped, that we know what the deficits are in each child, so we can address the deficits,” said Simmons.

Sounds more like a verbal assessment than a standardized test. But I have to worry when they attach the results to teacher evaluation and pay.

Link-bait.

The article only mentions that the state of Florida is developing assessments for kindergarten students for the upcoming school year. It does not say that those assessments will take the form of written exams. For all we know the assessments will take the form of a game.

(Edit: http://www.instituteofplay.org/2012/01/embedded-assessment-a...)

This seem like another form of Princess and Tiaras. They do this in Hong Kong for years already and I can't say it's turning out too well -- Kindergarten battles: How far would you go to get a place? http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/asia/hong-kong-kindergar...

Because our fellow participant Colin, who kindly submitted this link, enjoys thoughtful discussion of education reform, I have to let Colin know that this source (the blog hosted by the Washington Post newspaper from which this submission comes) is notoriously unreliable,[1] basically a mouthpiece for people who work in the current school system in the United States who do not desire for the system to change in the direction of finding out whether or not learners compelled to attend public schools actually learn anything while attending them. I have recommended to Colin before a much better source for more thoughtful articles on education policy issues, Education Next,[2] and I will recommend that site again for him and for onlookers here who would like to be part of an effort to improve schools around the world.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314676#up_3315028

[2] http://educationnext.org/

At 6 years old, a human is still developing basic skills, that are expected for everyone. The tests at that age give no useful information.

Won't tests at least show if those basic skills (e.g. ability to read the alphabet) are present or not?

You can test whether the kid is mature enough to start the school and it makes perfect sense. E.g. fine motor skills, ability to listen to instructions, attention span, ability to split words into letter requires some center to be developed enough too, etc.

If the kid is lacking in some too much, it makes sense to delay him a year. It does not mean the kid will be stupid, speed of development has little relation to "final" intelligence.

Ability to read the alphabet (or any other set of memorized facts) at that age has very little relation to how the kid will be able to do two years later.

If teacher has no idea if a kid in her class knows the alphabet or not without the kid taking a formal written test, then that is a terrible teacher who should be fired.

And more importantly all you'll really be testing is how the kid copes with the stress of formal testing, not what the kid actually knows.

that's just not true. IQ can be measured reliably from the age of 3 and remains stable throughout life

IQ tests are a great way to determine the outliers, but those test do not do that.

As a result, school districts have been developing final assessments in subjects including math, language arts, music, science and social studies to give to students, including kindergartners.

They are testing specific knowledge that must be learned at an inappropriate age, not inherent intelligence, and that is the problem.

IQ seems irrelevant to the performance of the teacher.

That seems to be quite a sweeping statement! Any sources for that?

The common excuse here it's that "you can't manage what you can't measure"

My other big beef with this nonsense is that it's very costly as well. I pay something like $5k in school taxes annually. I'll probably be picking up a job to lay for private schooling, because I refuse to send my son through the meat grinder.

its also assumed that tests are good way to measure. We send our son to a Montessori charter school. No homework (he's is 1st grade), its self-guided with teacher persuasion to keep learning new things, its fantastic. Montessori is bar far the best way I've found for schools to teach.

Tests are a great way to learn, and a terrible way to manage.

Tests are shown to reinforce learning. High stakes tests aren't, though, because they start to cause too many distortions.

And that's the whole problem. They're trying to manage kindergarteners.

I find the attitude that I assume must be driving this agenda to be so presumptuous as to be infuriating. In order to test something, you must know what it is you expect that thing to be at the time of the test.

The very notion that we can codify these expectations of 6 year olds really drives me nuts. Let them be whoever the hell they want to be, without worrying about whatever society thinks it needs from them, a little longer.

No, I don't think learning basic literacy skills is really going to crimp some kid's style. And I don't understand what you mean about testing. I was given a test on how well I could follow directions before they let me into kindergarten, and the test wasn't exactly strict.

Maybe you're just not very good at writing tests? Just because you can't think up a good test doesn't mean they don't exist.

I don't think you read what I wrote. I could come up with all kinds of shit I want 6 years olds to do, and come up with tests for it.

The point isn't whether or not I could. The point is whether or not I should.

I don't know what else to say except, as a former six-year-old, yes please? Reading isn't an academic exercise. It made my life so much better when I was six.

If a five year old wants to learn how to read better, then teach them. If they don't, let them learn something else.

Organizing and evaluating tests is not nearly as costly as finding/training/hiring/maintaining capable teachers who can evaluate students in a more analog (and preferable) way than looking at exam scores to determine whether they should be admitted/held back. Especially in places where there are more students/candidates than there are resources to teach, such as most east Asian countries.

In India they have competitive admission tests for toddlers into pre-school/kindergarden.

The good news is that it did not seem, in observation, to scar the population for life - except perhaps give them an aversion to learning - but it did give me anxiety about school, even though I joined this particular game when I was a teenager.

I was hoping other countries would not adopt such an inhumane way of admitting/assessing children but I see a wider adoption in the United States and I have heard it has been a system for a while in Japan.

When resources are limited I think you should do a lottery (and explicitly say its a lottery) so that children have no shame when they don't get in or destructive pride when they do.

Anyone have a list of countries where they do this kind of testing for pre-schoolers/kindergardeners?

I went to kindergarten in Hong Kong 25 years ago and we had final exams. Don't see what's the big deal about this.

An aversion to learning sounds like a debilitating life-scar.

The kindergarten testing in the article doesn't control whether kids can be in kindergarten, or stop them from from entering the next grade if they fail.

In many if not most cases, you can opt your kid out of much of this standardized testing - especially all the new Common Core stuff. Your kid should probably take the SAT depending on their circumstance, but you don't have to allow your grade school child to suffer through days of absurd testing.

Edit: Autocorrect

Edit 2: California's opt out form, for example: http://cuacc.org/CommonCoreOptOutFormFrontBack.pdf

I don't have any objection to basic assessment tests, such as the Iowa Basic Skills test. It's been used around the USA since the 1930s (my mother grew up in Iowa in the 1940s and took the test every year!). It's useful for gauging general progress, but I would definitely object to using it as a "final exam" used for determining future advancement. I don't think the article even hints at that.

In the Netherlands, children are 5 or 6 when they enter class 3 and thus start learning to read and do arithmetic. Is this considered too young by some?

They don't really get grades though.

If you google 'rapport groep 3' you'll find some grade lists, and there's info on the CITO website about class 3 tests:

http://wijzeroverdebasisschool.nl/groep-3/cito-groep-3/

> Simmons said all that the law requires is for a teacher to sit down with a kindergartener and ask about what he or she learned.

This would have scared the crap out of me as a child. Heck, sitting down in front of an authority figure and trying to convince them I've learned from them still scares me.

As much as I want education to be reformed, things like this push me toward considering alternate forms of education (for my future children), at least for the first few years of schooling.

I wouldn't let my daughter go to any school that did this, and I seriously think anyone that does needs to reevaluate their priorities.

Many people don't have much of a choice where to send their children to school. Public school may be all they can afford.

many states don't let you choose your own public school. In Arizona, you can send your kids to schools outside your area or district, only if they "have capacity".

Deleted comment

It's probably the result of a lot more than a simplistic single explanation that conforms to your worldview. There are a lot of different actors involved in education, way more than just testing corporations and representatives in congress.

Here come all the anti-testing comments, as expected. In the smartist era and in the meritocracy, we need more testing , not less, to help help identify gifted and slow students. Whether it's an IQ test or a proxy such as the SAT, testing is the best way to assess individual general cognitive functioning for large groups of people, as well as identity exceptionally talented individuals.

More testing raises the stakes for everyone, meaning that the overall population becomes better educated and competitive, in order to do well on the tests.

Furthermore, many smart students find coursework boring an get poor grades, but excel at standardized tests, because they already know the material.

There was a fascinating ted talk awhile ago about how standardized tests, contrary to being useless as often ascribed by the left, can predict lifetime outcomes such as wages, being published in a journal, level of academic attainment, and so on.

Complete nonsense.

Also,

"In Florida, the results of end-of-course exams affect the evaluation and pay of teachers."

So I bet low-income areas with less-educated parents working 2 jobs and too exhausted to really help their kids at home probably will have the lowest scores. So any quality-teachers in poorer areas will be less paid, so they'll leave, so the scores will go down, thus the pay goes down, so the quality-teachers leave, so the scores will go down, thus the pay goes down, so the quality-teachers leave...

And what's the end result of that? The kids who need help THE MOST are the ones who get THE LEAST.

>>There was a fascinating ted talk awhile ago about how standardized tests, contrary to being useless as often ascribed by the left, can predict lifetime outcomes such as wages, being published in a journal, level of academic attainment, and so on.

Anyone who is considering tests for predicting people's future potential should watch this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/

EDIT: I just noticed you said "the left", so you probably just have an axe to grind and I'm wasting my time with this comment.

Most education reformers want to evaluate teachers based on the improvement/lack of improvement in their classes. This tends to mitigate the problem of good teachers in weak schools being punished. I think this is in place some places, though I can't whether there are places that do this the absurd way you're afraid of.

> in the meritocracy

I beg to differ. How many 'hot start-ups' are hiring experienced developers in their 50's vs. 20-somethings? If we're going to discriminate on things other than merit, we're not in a meritocracy. Your experience may differ, but it's also just anecdotal.

> There was a fascinating ted talk awhile ago about how standardized tests, contrary to being useless as often ascribed by the left, can predict lifetime outcomes such as wages, being published in a journal, level of academic attainment, and so on.

Assuming that this is correct, there will still be outliers (people that score poorly, but are still very successful). At the same time, the "kids that are too smart for school" are also outliers. You're entire argument, in my opinion, comes across as "I am in group of outliers X, therefore we all need to optimize everything for people in group X."

This is GP's point. If you want to stop discriminating based on irrelevant things like age, you have to test relevant things.

So, the solution to (e.g.) age-ism in the workplace is final exams for 4-5 year olds?

The "final exam" in the article doesn't discriminate among kids, but teachers. There don't seem to be any consequences or "discrimination" for kids who fail the tests.

It is true that you can't manage what you can't measure. It's also true that you'd be hard pressed to find a crowd more quantitatively oriented than HN readers. It follows that there must be a fault with your analysis.

The fault is in the ability to measure cognitive abilities in children. We know surprisingly little about how the human brain develops. A wrong measurement is worse than no measurement at all, for a multitude of reasons, the biggest of which is the fact that measuring will introduce undesired side effects. If you are introducing side effects, with no actionable result to show for, you should consider the value of measuring.

As such, and given that western societies can accommodate free education at least until puberty, the solution is to provide free education. Assess cognitive abilities, for resource allocation purposes, at the terminus of the free education track.

There are important and key differences between "study for the test", "study for the knowledge", "passing the test", and "demonstrating your knowledge".

For example: My wife can pass multiple-choice tests with little of the knowledge [she freely admits this]. She had to study her head off for a recent test in a subject she knew little about, because the test was only partially multiple-choice. She ended up passing, yet if I were cruel -- this subject is something I enjoy learning about on my own -- I could snap-test her at will to see if she retained anything for any given time period after the test, and she could likewise do so for herself in everyday life.

Standardized tests miss so much useful marketable skills (sales, personal interaction). How many people do you know that "suck at taking tests"? I'd like to see that Ted Talk. Do you have a reference?

are you talking about Sir Ken Robinson's http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

Why would we want to separate people ?

Al contrario. We want to use testing to identify holes and other areas of opportunity. To help the teachers teach better and the students to learn better.

GP said "identify", not separate. In high school they kicked me out of Algebra class into a higher math class because they could see that I was bored. It would have been a huge waste of time and resources for me to keep sitting in that class for the rest of the year.

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