High-stakes Standardized Tests Research Articles

The Mathematics Assessment Collaborative: Performance Testing to Improve Instruction

American schools are awash in standardized testing. Students are spending more and more time on state-mandated, high-stakes tests linked to state standards. There are variations among the states in terms of how often they test students, what subjects they test, whether their exams are normor criterion-referenced, and whether multiple-choice questions are supplemented by other question types. But the passage of federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation makes it clear that, in the next few years, high-stakes standardized testing will only increase nationwide.

Outcome-Based Tyranny: Teaching Compliance While Testing Like A State

idea of measuring the progress of millions of individual students by subjecting them to standardized tests is absurd. This does not measure the progress made by the student; it measures the progress made by the system. Our schools are really factories of mass production where the object isn't to educate and inform, but to produce a homogenous culture of non-thinking conformists and consumers. The finished product is like a fast food hamburger from McDonald's. It's uniformly the same no matter where you buy it from. -Charles Sullivan The Roots of A More Activist Anthropology During the last century anthropological research challenged racial, gender, ethnic, and class discrimination in American society. Among anthropology's most significant activist contributions to 20th century American public policy are its arguments against uniformist visions linking race and ethnicity with intelligence. Given anthropology's past role in challenging the determinative applications of standardized I.Q., it is surprising to find most anthropologists sitting on the sidelines as America prepares for a standardized testing revival-a revival whose outcome stands to be as discriminatory and punitive as the I.Q.-linked immigration or placement schemes of the past century.1 In the early 1900s anthropologists like Franz Boas criticized the biased nature of tests, and challenged the uses of standardized test results by educational, immigration and law enforcement officials (see Boas 1912 & Wax 2000). Otto Klineberg's critiques of biased I.Q. tests established the social dangers of assigning significant meaning to tests that measured cultural participation more than they measured innate intelligence (Klineberg 1935 & 1963). Gene Weltfish suffered the ire of Senator Joseph McCarthy for publishing The Races of Mankind (co-authored with Ruth Benedict) and claiming that Northern Negroes had higher I.Q. scores than Southern Whites (Price 2004).2 A host of popular anthropologists such as Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead and Marvin Harris wrote popular articles, essays and books to educate the general public on the dangers of relying on standardized I.Q. tests to sort individuals in any meaningful way. And anthropological critiques of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 1996 best-seller, The Bell Curve, clarified how economic and social stratification continues to overlay measurements of and other realms of competency (i.e., Alland 1996; Brace 1996). At the heart of anthropological critiques of I.Q. tests is the observation that these tests do not objectively measure some quantity of intelligence; instead these measures are themselves biased tools used to justify the maintenance or creation of systems of stratification. Measurements of human mental capacities are seldom just measurements, they are themselves social statements: statements of power, desire, hierarchy and ultimately statements of control. These measurements transpire within preexisting political economies and their use tends to reify rather than challenge extant hierarchies. Methodological critiques of standardized tests have historically been met with vicious renunciations by social conservatives. Anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists critiquing the use of culturally-biased tests to sort conscripts during the First World War were attacked as unpatriotic dupes, while critics of racist abuses of IQ tests were frequently labeled Communists in the mid-twentieth century (Herman 1995; Price 2004). Today neoconservatives similarly dismiss those who oppose standardized testing regimes as being welfare-state-devotees fearing the loss of their dependent constituencies once they get hooked on phonics and shake their dependency on government cheese.3 But while such reactionary grousing strikes a cord with some Americans, the tilted logic supporting the drive for excessive high stakes testing should be critiqued Current commitments to improving educational standards through an increased reliance on high stakes standardized tests are historically linked to American social engineers' attraction to standardized I. …

The Death of Science?: What We Risk in Our Rush toward Standardized Testing and the Three R'S

The authors raise an important question: Will standardized testing -- or, more accurately, the politicization of the standards movement -- snuff out the promise of methods for American education? FROM THE post-Sputnik panic of the 1960s to the landmark Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) of 1997, America's lackluster performance in education has served as a catalyst for education reform. For more than 30 years, teachers, administrators, researchers, and corporate leaders concerned about the future of instruction in America have contributed to significant improvements in curricula and instructional methodology. Today, a model of education exists that is founded on successful practice and validated by profound achievement gains. It has begun to attract the attention of school systems nationwide. Referred to in varying forms as or inquiry-based science, this approach is increasingly associated with a growing network of resource centers operating as part of or in tandem with school systems. Ironically, even as inquiry methods and resource centers stand poised to reinvigorate K-12 education in America, the national movement emphasizing reading, writing, and mathematics instruction, as measured by high-stakes standardized tests, threatens to suppress the effort to make truly revolutionary progress in education. Teachers and school administrators across the U.S. are facing enormous pressure to improve test scores in the basic skills areas. Consequently, they have been forced to reduce -- or in some cases eliminate -- the amount of class time devoted to instruction. Such measures will have a devastating long-term impact on education in America and, subsequently, on the medical, corporate, academic, and industrial sectors that rely on well-educated American students. How many of our scientists, researchers, graduate students, and entrepreneurs first found their interest in sparked by experiences in school? These very experiences are now jeopardized by the standards push in many states. With politicians, education critics, and the news media calling for basic skills accountability and with their attention fixated on improved standardized test scores, our nation's scientific future is at risk. Science Education That Works More than 35 years ago, Highline School District in Seattle began to experiment with a new way to teach in elementary school. Rather than have students passively observe while teachers talked about -- still the way is taught in more than 80% of America's K-8 schools1 -- this new system enabled the students themselves to perform ready-to-use experiments from prepackaged kits. Students learned by doing science, not by reading about in textbooks or by watching their teachers conduct demonstrations. In the Highline program, students began to explore and discover collaboratively, rather than just absorb and memorize in the isolation of their desks and texts. Students were allowed to learn over time -- preparing questions, designing experiments, organizing data, and developing conclusions as real scientists do -- rather than race through the mile-wide/inch-deep material covered in their textbooks. At this early date, the kit-based inquiry movement was born. The inquiry approach was founded on the premise that children learn actively, not passively. Students are introduced to methods and use them to engage in hands-on, minds-on activities that inspire them to discover scientific knowledge rather than being told answers by the teacher or textbook. In the inquiry model, teachers serve as guides and lead students through the experiments. Using the inquiry method, science content is covered in greater depth compared to a superficial traditional textbook approach. …

Beyond Standardization: Testing and Assessment in Standards-Based Reform

From the perspectives of learning theories, the paper discusses the roles of testing and assessment in meeting real academic goals in standards-based reform. It argues that performance-based alternative assessment, which is based on modern constructivists' view of learning, has advantages over high-stakes standardized testing which can be traced back to traditional theory of behaviorism. To help teachers design an appropriate alternative assessment, the paper offers suggestions on what teachers should know and be able to do according to the standards. The paper concludes that teachers should create a curriculum based on dynamic, performance-based assessment to assess students armed with thinking skills for the 21st century.

Excellence in Education Versus High-Stakes Standardized Testing

The evidence is missing for high-stakes standardized testing of either intelligence or achievement as a reform tool, a tool for producing higher student achievement. The focus on invalid testing allows us to ignore the well-documented importance of the quality of teaching as a key factor in student achievement. There is no doubt that teachers can become powerful agents in raising the academic performance of children to high levels, regardless of common impediments such as poverty, bilingualism, and so forth. With the extreme and almost exclusive focus on high-stakes testing, we lose the opportunity to support valid staff development that would make all of our teachers powerful.

Defining Literacy

Teacher educators face a dilemma: How do we prepare preservice teachers to pass new high-stakes certification tests when these tests are often based on philosophical perspectives that run counter to our own beliefs about literacy, learning, and teaching. In this article, the authors offer an inquiry-oriented approach that uses the lens of the New Literacy Studies to help prospective teachers simultaneously prepare for and critique high-stakes standardized tests such as the Communication and Literacy Skills (CLS) portion of the Massachusetts Educator Certification Tests. The authors describe a specific activity, inviting preservice teachers to explore the social nature of literacies, investigate the characteristics of the CLS, and reflect on this type of high-stakes assessment. After providing a critique of the CLS test based on this type of activity, the authors offer recommendations for more extended activities to be used in teacher education courses.

Systemic Reform through Teacher Change: Congruence and contradiction

The need for the systemic reform of science and mathematics education in the USA has become a national priority. Politicians, business and the learned societies are demanding change in the performance of US students relative to the best international standards such as those measures by the TIMMS tests. The National Science Foundation is responding to this challenge in providing funding for systemic reform initiatives across many school districts. These reform efforts usually over five years are beginning to show signs of institutionalized change in teacher practice. However the community chorus for enhanced student test scores has resulted in the proliferation of high stakes standardized tests, usually the low-cost pencil and paper variety. These tests have the potential to sidetrack genuine reform efforts in science education such as those contained in the National Science Education Standards (NSES). This paper analyses the congruence and contradictions of this current reform agenda.

Assessment Policy and Political Spectacle1

This paper relates the history of assessment policy in Arizona using an extensive base of interview, observation, and archival data. In less than a decade, two radical shifts took place: from basic skills and standardized testing to progressive reform by performance testing to high-stakes standardized testing based on state standards. We argue that the shape of assessment policy and policy change had more to do with political spectacle and the struggle for power, position, resources, and the control over public schools than with empirical or rational analysis, moral imperative, or democratic debate.

Assessment Policy and Political Spectacle1

This paper relates the history of assessment policy in Arizona using an extensive base of interview, observation, and archival data. In less than a decade, two radical shifts took place: from basic skills and standardized testing to progressive reform by performance testing to high-stakes standardized testing based on state standards. We argue that the shape of assessment policy and policy change had more to do with political spectacle and the struggle for power, position, resources, and the control over public schools than with empirical or rational analysis, moral imperative, or democratic debate.