It's also explicitly stated in the fourth caution item.
The author seems to be presenting the question as a boring context that students have to deal with, but there are plenty of tasks where some degree of self control is required to read and understand a few hundred words that aren't real exciting.
To me, the big problem with testing is that it is not particularly adaptive. Students that demonstrate a reasonable level of reading comprehension when they are 10 probably don't need to be evaluated for it 5 more times before they leave school (of course tests do get successively more difficult/higher level, but doing that in lockstep by age is a waste).
I agree, but assume standardized testing takes a full 2 days / year and you either do it every 4 years (3th, 9th, 11th) or every year. Well every year costs an extra 2 days on 3 / 4 years and assuming 180 school days a year that's (2*3/4)/180 = 0.83%.
So, yea it's probably not that useful, but if you want to get upset over something focus on the terrible quality of textbooks or something that can have a slightly larger impact. Even the school lunch program has a larger impact on student performance.
PS: Or just mandate that standardized testing does not count as part of the minimum required instruction time per year.
I did carefully leave "standardized" out of my comment. I have a problem with the whole process of present->practice->see what stuck. It has been the most practical method for teaching large groups of people for a long time, but I think there is a lot of potential in using adaptive testing to mechanize the evaluation and tracking of what students understand, which hopefully leads to students getting more and better personal attention.
The author seems to be presenting the question as a boring context that students have to deal with, but there are plenty of tasks where some degree of self control is required to read and understand a few hundred words that aren't real exciting.
To me, the big problem with testing is that it is not particularly adaptive. Students that demonstrate a reasonable level of reading comprehension when they are 10 probably don't need to be evaluated for it 5 more times before they leave school (of course tests do get successively more difficult/higher level, but doing that in lockstep by age is a waste).