High-stakes testing often forces teachers to focus on underachieving students and neglect gifted ones, researchers say.
“Teachers feel constrained to the test, and the standardizing of practices creates a loss of creativity in teaching,” said Sally Reis, a professor at the University of Connecticut who is to speak this week at a statewide conference on gifted-and-talented students.
“Teachers focus on kids who don?t test well,” added Reis, a researcher at the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented.
As a result, talented students can be left unchallenged, never learn how to work hard, study or look up words they don?t know, and become underachievers, Reis said.
In an average third-grade class, students? reading abilities can span 10 grade levels, so teachers need more help developingstrategies that cater to students of varying abilities, she said.
When high-achieving students are poor, their chances of falling behind are that much greater, according to a recent report from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.
From first to fifth grade, almost half of the lower-income students in the top 25 percent of their class in reading fell out of this rank, the report says.
State officials also hope the conference helps meet the demand for talented workers going into the sciences to fill a shortage that will grow with the planned expansion at Maryland?s military bases.
“We need kids who are ready to be entrepreneurs, problem-solvers and researchers, so we have to attack real-world problems in the classroom,” said Jeanne Paynter, a specialist for gifted-and-talented education at the state Department of Education.
“We need to teach students how to think, work in teams and be curious. That is what is really needed today with BRAC.”
