Teaching to the test

"Teaching to the test" is a colloquial term for any method of education whose curriculum is heavily focused on preparing students for a standardized test.

Opponents of this practice argue that it forces teachers to limit curriculum to a set range of knowledge or skills in order to increase student performance on the mandated test. This produces an unhealthy focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills ("drill and kill") and limits the teacher's ability to foster a holistic understanding of the subject matter. With high-stakes testing impeding over every decision teachers make, they are often forced to teach to the tests rather than to their students. This can drain instruction of passion and meaning as students are taught information from a bare-bones curriculum. This would be an incidence of Campbell's law, the general principle that a social indicator distorts the process it is intended to monitor. Furthermore, opponents argue, teachers who engage in it are typically below-average teachers. Some research suggests that teaching to the test is ineffective and often does not achieve its primary goal of raising student scores.