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Evaluation of student work in schools has been a major concern of both the general public and

educational professionals.

• Across the nation, state testing systems powerfully affect curriculum, instruction, school cultures, and the quality of education delivered to our nation’s children. They can either support important learning or undermine it.

• The standardized achievement test is designed to provide norm-referenced interpretations of student achievement in specific content areas at certain points in their education careers.

• These test scores usually appear on the first page of the newspaper, building a sense of their importance.

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Evaluation of student work in schools has been a major concern of both the general public and

educational professionals. (cont.)

• What are the conditions behind these tests that summon such varied responses?

1 Mass education was a great social experiment, first tried in the United States in the mid 1800s.

2 Achievement tests always have been used by the public to evaluate educational progress.

3 U.S. school have used tests to weed out students and eliminate them from further education opportunities.

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Definition of Terms

• A standardized teststandardized test is an objective measure of a behavior sample, obtained under uniform conditions.

• NR’s (norm-referenced tests)NR’s (norm-referenced tests) are designed to highlight achievement differences between and among students to produce a dependable rank order of students across a continuum of achievement from high achievers to low achievers

• CRTs (criterion-referenced testsCRTs (criterion-referenced tests)) determine ‘…what test takers can do and what they know

• Both NRTs and CRTs can be standardized.

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II. Historic Background

• The first documented achievement tests were administered in the period 1810 to 1875, when American educators changed their focus from educating the elite to educating the masses.

• At the turn of the century, the focus shifted from achievement testing to ability testing for the purpose of sorting and classifying students.

• Technology advances meant that multiple choice tests could offer test data about students at a very small cost.

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II. Historic Background (cont.)

• The Stanford Achievement Test is first published in 1923.

• By the 1950s, the Bloom taxonomy emerged.

• Originating from Ralph Tyler’s work in the 1930s came the criterion-referenced test.

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II. Historic Background (cont.)

• Three factors affected standardized testing in the latter part of the 20th century:

1 changing demographics caused by immigration, 2 technological challenges introduced during the

Cold War and exacerbated by the computer age and,

3 racial inequality

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II. Historic Background (cont.)

• polls show that the public wants the information from publishers’ standardized achievement tests

• 68 percent of respondents to a USA/Gallup poll favor President Clinton’s national testing program, and other polls continue to show support for standardized testing.

• Parents are increasingly willing to pay for independent evaluations of their children’s achievement in basic skills, as evidenced by the rise of private testing and tutoring centers

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III. What contribution to public education comes from standardized testing:

• defines the purpose and processes of schooling in most states.

• affect curriculum and instruction.

• affect the culture of learning, student motivation, and the underlying conceptions of what learning is and how humans learn.

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III. What contribution to public education comes from standardized testing: (cont.)

• determining students suitable for remediation.

• ‘minimum competency’ in the ‘70s.

• judge for finding the lagging students objectively and allows them to be removed by empirical methods.

• used as a mechanism of social control

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a. from the point of view of the public,

• standardized tests do not reflect how well children learn in school

• the President’s proposal to develop voluntary fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math tests by 1999

• Standardized testing skyrocketed shortly after the National commission on Excellence in Education issued its 1983 report, ‘A Nation at Risk.’

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a. from the point of view of the public, (cont.)

• increased parental participation on boards developing new educational philosophies and innovative curricula

• Program evaluators have paid more attention to political factors.

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b. from the point of view of the classroom teachers

• Teachers complain that the exams bore children and use up valuable instruction time

• ’Teaching to the test,’ or tailoring curriculum around exam material

• call ‘high-stakes testing,’ which pressures school officials to generate elevated standardized exam results

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b. from the point of view of the classroom teachers (cont.)

• if the standardized tests are also used to measure an educator’s teaching ability:

1 resulted in an emphasis on low level skills in the classroom

2 driving classroom practice in the opposite direction of educational reform

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b. from the point of view of the classroom teachers (cont.).

• showing where teaching needs to be changed in order to better suit the subject matter.

• show what areas educators do well in and what areas are less developed.

• serve as a guideline to individual educators who need to change their methods in order to better focus on what should be learned.