BOSTON – Kaye Oliver knows the high school students in her government class relate history to their lives better when she includes news as part of her lessons, but she says the time it takes to prepare them for standardized tests has cut into her use of current events.

“That is sadly lacking when it’s all tied to a test,” said Oliver, the social studies department chairman at Calvert High School in Prince Frederick, Md. “We don’t have the time to talk anymore, to have a discussion about real world events. We have to move on.”

A study released Friday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force at Harvard University shows 75 percent of social studies, government and civics teachers who have cut back on using news in the classroom blame the time it takes to prepare for standardized tests. Eighty percent who said they planned to cut back also cited testing requirements.

Still, the survey found 50 percent of responding teachers say they are making greater use of news than a few years ago.

The federal No Child Left Behind law mandates testing each year in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

“Everywhere that mandatory testing comes into play, it results in less use of news,” said Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who prepared the study.

The study was based on the e-mailed responses of 1,262 civics, government and social studies teachers in grades 5 through 12.

The participants, randomly sampled from a list of more than 30,000 teachers nationally, were contacted over a two-month period in the fall.