Psycho-educational testing: unfair advantage or personal gain?
We use tests every single day. Whether it’s to test our potential career fittings, our personality or various aspects of human psychology and cognition. Tests are also used in order to test hypotheses and work towards answering intriguing questions in the field of psychology. We also use tests in elementary and high school, something we may remember all to well, or perhaps not at all (high school study methods preferred to be around midnight the night before in attempts to fit every piece of knowledge in our already-busy minds). Tests will continue to appear throughout our lives, and again as a midterm upcoming (sorry for the fresh reminder, midterms are upon us).
However, oftentimes tests are not used in order to see how we would best use our time in our educational careers. Instead, we sometimes slowly learn these facts via standardized school testing, and sometimes when it’s too late. Psycho-educational assessments of children is not a novel field, however it is definitely not in the mainstream. For example, there exists “psycho-ed” assessments which focus on identifying strengths and weaknesses of students cognitively and academically using interviews, parent, teacher and child rating-scales, one-on-one testing results and observations of the child. The aim is to get a clear picture of the student’s abilities and needs in the classroom, at home and with peers and then target these areas with intervention or additional support. However, this seems to be an external resource, which is oftentimes very difficult and unfeasible for families to find and use.
What if there was a test that would be able to tell you what areas to focus on, before having grades be forever entrenched on a transcript? Would a test like this even really help without additional guidance provided alongside the results, and thus run the possibility of instilling false hopes? Many questions arise on the ethical implications that such a test would cause in an educational environment: would this lead to a sort of unfair advantage or competition between certain school children? For example, if there are more well-known interventions and well-understood methods of working on certain areas of weakness in a school-context, rather than others. One must also keep in mind the importance of confidentiality in such a scenario, so that particular information cannot be unfairly used against certain individuals.
It is definitely an interesting thought to pursue. However, like many pseudo-psychological instalments, a lot of thought must go into the reliability, validity and different unpredicted effects that the use of such tests might have on a school environment as well on individual school children and families. Oftentimes tests are thought to give a lot more information than they do in actuality, and the creation of these tests are not an easy feat to begin with. How do we ensure we are adequately testing for specific skills that we want to test for, so as to not give students and families wrong information, and thus subsequently skew which aspects of learning are focused on in school. Particular areas of strength, weakness and school-skills must be identified and defined before constructing such a test.
That being said, it can still provide some information rather than leaving weaknesses and strengths, both of which should be highlighted, in the psychological-testing dark. What if a test could clearly point out your areas of weakness in order to enhance your time spent studying on a certain final, or better yet speed up the time it took you to understand high school trigonometry? Awareness of areas needing improvement may be the initial step in order to gather adequate resources in working on such areas. But should these kinds of tests be standardized in schools, or be left to attain via individual quests? I believe knowledge is power, and so if done right, such testing would be a massive benefit in specifically tailoring school programs to children and thus maximize the efficiency and learning potential of students.
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