Does High Stakes Testing Improve Learning?

 

Dr. Wendy Ghiora – Post #124 -  June 9, 2014

High stakes testing has been used throughout our great nation for decades.  The results of these tests can bring rewards, but they can also bring gruesome sanctions to schools and teachers.  All this is based on student test scores.  Much of the research at hand indicates, such testing such be looked at more closely and carefully evaluated for what it is really doing.

A recent article in, Issues in Science and Technology, Michael Hout, Stuart Elliott, and Sara Frueh, discusses the efforts by U.S. policymakers to improve K-12 education by offering incentives—either to schools, to teachers, or to students themselves—to increase students’ standardized test scores. The article further states:

“All of these policies share a fundamental principle: They reward or sanction students, teachers, or schools based on how well students score on standardized tests. Policymakers hope that by holding various players in the education system accountable for how much students learn, they will be motivated to improve student performance.”

So, how are these incentives affecting student learning? The National Research Council, using experts in education, economics, and psychology, found:

“The incentive systems that have been carefully studied have had only small effects, and in many cases no effect, on student learning.”

Research has shown that incentives tend to encourage teachers to “teach to the test” by narrowing their focus to the material most likely to appear on the test. As a result, their students’ scores may be artificially inflated because the score reflects their knowledge of only part of the material the students should know about the subject; i.e. the part that is most likely to appear on the test. For example, if teachers move from covering the full range of material in eighth-grade mathematics to focusing only on the portion included on the test, their students’ test scores may rise even as their learning in the untested part of the subject stays the same or even declines.

Jonathan Supovitz, Penn Graduate School of Education, affirms through his research that high-stakes assessments can and do motivate change in teachers’ instruction. But that these changes tend to be superficial adjustments of practice that are often focused on modifications in content coverage and test preparation practices rather than deep improvements to instruction efforts.

Instead of providing a system to make real improvement in teaching and learning, we have created a system that values summative testing as the cure to what ails us. No one wins in this system, not the schools, nor the teachers and especially not the students.

In the article, High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning, March 28, 2002, Audrey L. Amrein,  and David C. Berliner of Arizona State University conclude the following in their research on this very topic:

At the present time, there is no compelling evidence from a set of states with high-stakes testing policies that those policies result in transfer to the broader domains of knowledge and skill for which high-stakes test scores must be indicators. Because of this, the high-stakes tests being used today do not, as a general rule, appear valid as indicators of genuine learning, of the types of learning that approach the American ideal of what an educated person knows and can do. Moreover, as predicted by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, data from high-stakes testing programs too often appear distorted and corrupted.

Both the uncertainty associated with high-stakes testing data, and the questionable validity of high-stakes tests as indicators of the domains they are intended to reflect, suggest that this is a failed policy initiative. High-stakes testing policies are not now and may never be policies that will accomplish what they intend. Could the hundreds of millions of dollars and the billions of person hours spent in these programs be used more wisely? Furthermore, if failure in attaining the goals for which the policy was created results in disproportionate negative affects on the life chances of America's poor and minority students, as it appears to do, then a high-stakes testing policy is more than a benign error in political judgment. It is an error in policy that results in structural and institutional mechanisms that discriminate against all of America's poor and many of America's minority students. It is now time to debate high-stakes testing policies more thoroughly and seek to change them if they do not do what was intended and have some unintended negative consequences, as well.

Harold L. Scott, of The University of Nebraska at Omaha, note that through the implementation of No Child Left Behind, every school is trying to motivate students to achieve while addressing the needs of students who struggle (Roderick, 2005).

He found that rather than being taught to think critically, students are more likely to be taught

how to take the test. Mr. Scott further asserts there is no evidence that states that implemented high stakes tests showed improvement in student achievement on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), American College Testing (ACT) or National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (Braun, 2004). Research concluded that states that introduce consequences (high-stakes) to their statewide tests did not show any particular gain in their statewide NAEP scores (Rosenshine, 2003).

Furthermore, Amrein and Berliner (2002) indicated that there is no evidence that high-stakes tests improved student achievement. Their findings showed that student achievement either remained at the same level or went down when compared to results prior to the date when high stakes testing was implemented.

Mr. Scott’s study, also included data from McNeil, 2008, revealing that in the state of Texas, where the standardized, high-stakes testing became the model for the nation’s most comprehensive federal education policy, more than 135,000 youth are lost from the state’s high schools every year. Dropout rates were highest (60%) among African American and Latino students. Results of the study, which included analysis of the accountability policy in high-poverty high schools in a major urban district, showed that the state’s high-stakes accountability system had a direct impact on the severity of the dropout problem.

“Demographic characteristics were related significantly to most achievement outcomes, but high-stakes testing policies demonstrated few relationships with achievement. The Few relationships between high-stakes testing and achievement tended to appear only when demographic data was missing. Based on the negative consequences, high-stakes testing does not improve student learning.” (Marchant, G.J. 2006).

In Chicago, retained students were expected to raise their test scores to the promotional requirements by the end of their second time in the grade. If unsuccessful, these students were referred to special education because without the exemption given for special education status, students would not be able to progress. Thus, special education may have been used as a means of getting struggling students around the mandated testing and reporting policy. (Roderick, 2005).

The extensive research done by these and many other educational experts suggests that high stakes testing is not the solution to improvement in learning.  What it accomplishes is it makes teachers more likely to set up their curriculum to “teach to the test,” rather than teach critical thinking skills and a more comprehensive overview of the subject they are supposed to teach.  Student gains and achievement have not improved due to high stakes testing.  The only increase noted was the dropout rate, especially of minorities in the state of Texas.

I humbly suggest, instead of spending billions of tax dollars on high stakes testing; how about spending half the amount on research-based, proven methods of professional development that works? Money should also be spent on quality leadership training.  A school with outstanding academic achievement is a school with outstanding leadership. The two go hand in hand.