EEB425 – Reflecting on Professional Practice: Assessment & Reporting
Assessment Item 1
Critical Issue Essay

“Assessment is a method for analysing and describing student learning outcomes or program achievement of objectives” (Assessment services, 2011). A form of Assessment is standardised testing. This kind of test is used to “measure the performance of a group against that of a larger group” (assessment services, 2011). Standardized tests are often used in large-scale assessment projects, where the overall results of the group are more important than specific data on each individual client.
Standardised Testing within Australian education has become an important and controversial issue since the introduction of the National
This has a negative impact on the quality of education that these teachers can offer (Education, 2006-2011). Political and governmental stakeholders are worried that students may be forced to study a narrow range of topics, rather than exploring a wide variety of issues, and they will not learn valuable life skills, as a result of stress about standardised test performance. Many teachers believe that standardised tests restrict the curricula that they can teach, because they want their students to succeed on important and sometimes life-changing tests (J. Herman, 2005).
Along with actual teaching for standardised testing there is all the administrative work that needs to happen in order for the school to gain optimum results. These issues include timetabling the test into the term and working towards being “test” reading at that time. Sending notes out to parents stating dates and times of testing so as the children are at school and can be tested ‘equally’ with all other children and finally one of the major issues with standardised testing is the test supervision. Some schools find this quite a simple task as people from the outside community volunteer, but it can be a stressful job for a school to organise (D.M Sadker, 2006).
One of the major issues with standardised testing results is the wait period for results. Teachers feel that at the time of the testing