MEAPS

This past week in my field placement the third grade classroom i am in started taking the MEAP. They did a section of reading in the morning that was supposed to take 70 minutes and ended up taking them about 2 hours. They still had another section of reading in the afternoon that same day, which was a lot shorter. I remember taking the MEAPs and how worried as a student I was to do my best. I do remember they took a long time to do, but I don't think they took two hours! That's such a long time for a student to sit there and stare at a booklet full of reading passages and questions. And if you happened to be one of the students who finished early you had to sit there quietly while reading. coloring or working on homework until all your classmates were finished. It's different seeing the MEAPs from a teacher's perspective instead of a student's perspective now. I think it's more nerve wrecking for a teacher than for the students because these tests determine how good of a teacher you are and how much your students have learned. I have realized through all my education classes how controversial these types of tests can be though because teachers are supposed to make learning fun and meaningful for their students and these tests hinder that a bit because teachers are becoming forced to teach to the tests instead of what they think is important for their students to know. It's important for teachers to teach life skills and things about the real world, which are not covered in a MEAP. If I was a student now, especially in high school I probably would not take the MEAP. It used to be that if you did well on it that you could get money to go to college, but that was stripped away so now it is just a test to see how well teachers are teaching. But it's not even a true test of that either! Another way needs to be figured out to assess students knowledge and teachers teaching abilities than through a MEAP or standardized test.