Although teachers may be called upon to alter their perceptions of students on the basis of information received from standardized tests, they should rely upon their own perceptions of the validity of test results rather than upon those of the support service staff who administer them. The discrepancy between perceived student ability and tested student ability can be attributed to a teacher's more intimate knowledge of the student, compared to the kind of statistical knowledge measured by a standardized test. Both the teacher and support staff can come to a consensus regarding test validity as long as the first-hand empirical knowledge of the teacher is considered equal to, or even greater than, that of the test administrator who merely tabulates raw data.
In her "Teachers and Teaching," Anne Martin examines the effects of special needs intervention on classroom life because she believes that special educators often ignore the classroom teacher's role in helping children learn and grow. She then offers an alternative, or adjunct, to special needs testing: collaboration among teachers and testing staff would be in the better interest of children than a reliance upon test-generated data of student performance.
Martin begins by assuming the stance of an informed insider, one who knows classroom teaching and children like no support service staff member can. Her primary concern is that her students will be needlessly pigeon-holed or stereotyped if they are considered educational problems. She would rather focus on the abilities, rather than the weaknesses, of her students, in order to avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in wrongly labelling a student as "special."
In her bolstering arguments, Martin presents anecdotal evidence that some of her brightest and most creative students were originally thought to possess learning problems. Throughout her article, and true to her stance as a classroom teacher having intima...