This week’s readings reaffirms my understanding of the impact of the intent behind certain educational practices like assessments and technology. Garcia’s chapter on assessments explores the harm of excessive testing due to the policies of NCLB and ESSA with misidentification of EBL students which leads to them being placed into into deficient/remedial education and putting additional pressure on teachers to teach for the exam (which the chapter mentioning many teachers spending a month on just preparing for the test) which means other subjects that aren't tested like social studies to be neglected.
Furthermore, these standardized tests assume certain things to be norms when they aren’t necessary for students with different language practices and culture. Although I wasn’t an EBL student, I also experienced something similar when a physics question made it so that I needed to know what a dashboard of a car is to answer the question. However, my parents didn’t own a car at the time and I mixed up the hood with the dashboard. It must be a lot harder for EBL students. Testing also doesn’t differentiate between language proficiency and content proficiency which means that students who aren’t content proficient or language proficient due to factors like interrupted or inadequate schooling (Moussa in the Chapter) are grouped together with students who are content proficient but not language proficient (Jeehyae) which means that one of the students is not getting enough support.
However, this doesn’t mean that all assessments are bad. It really depends on how the assessments are administered and how the results are utilized. Most teachers agree that assessments are necessary (in the chapter most teachers didn’t want to abolish standardized testing just to reduce the frequency) in order to gauge the student’s abilities, where they improved, and where they need more support. The chapter also gives us many alternative assessment practices that can accurately assess the students while also accommodating their needs like using performance assessments, transadapting the assessments, allowing the students to answer in their home language, bilingual assessments, etc.
This also reminds me of the role that technology can play in education. I feel like we often villainize technology and AI especially since they can have a detrimental effect on a student’s education if used incorrectly. However, this week’s readings remind us that technology can be utilized to help students learn more effectively through tailoring to the students needs (which teachers might not be able to do with so many students in one classroom), allowing them to be more creative, and being more interactive. I see this being used at my field placement as well as my job site. At my field placement, the students have ipads with educational apps that they can use to read, do math, do research, etc. They also took assessments on those apps which tells them what skills they excel at and what skills they need to work on. The app then tailors the lessons on the app to what they need to work on. At my worksite the kids are also on their laptops with educational websites that turn lessons to educational games that are more interactive and gratifying. Instead of villainizing technology, educators should learn to harness it to better educate their students.