TCLA: Bill of Rights: Features: 5: ASU Press Release

BENEFITS OF HIGH-STAKES TESTING PROGRAMS QUESTIONED

TEMPE, Ariz -- High-stakes tests currently receive strong legislative support within many states. These tests are intended to change the behavior of teachers and students in desirable ways. A study conducted by researchers at Arizona State University, however, contends that the effects of high-stakes tests are not always desirable.

The study is published in the March 28 edition of the on-line, refereed, scholarly journal Education Policy Analysis Archives [Amrein, A. L & Berliner, D. C. (2002, March 28). High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(18). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18/].

The authors examined data from 18 states that have implemented high-stakes testing programs, to see whether these programs were affecting student learning. The data used in the analysis consisted of scores obtained over two decades from four separate standardized and commonly used tests overlapping the same domains as the state tests: the ACT, SAT, NAEP and AP tests.

The study investigated whether students showed any transfer of knowledge beyond what was needed to perform on the state’s own high-stakes test. If the scores on the related tests increased following implementation of a high-stakes testing program, this was seen as evidence that high-stakes testing promotes transfer of learning, which is the ultimate goal of schooling.

"Analyses of these data reveal that if the intended goal of high-stakes testing policy is to increase student learning, then that policy is not working. While a state's high-stakes test may show increased scores, there is little support in these data that such increases are anything but the result of test preparation and/or the exclusion of students from the testing process," the study reports.

The authors base their conclusions in part on a social science version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which holds that, "The more important that any quantitative social indicator becomes in social decision-making, the more likely it will be to distort and corrupt the social process it is intended to monitor." Based on this principle, the practice of attaching serious personal and educational consequences to performance on tests for schools, administrators, teachers, and students, may have distorting and corrupting effects on the education student receive.

The study also reports that high-stakes testing programs have unintended consequences such as a narrowing of the curriculum, heavy use of drill as the method of instruction, increased student drop-out rates, teachers’ and schools' cheating on exams, teachers’ defection from the profession and so forth.

Furthermore, the study found that high-stakes testing policies appear to result in disproportionate negative effects on the life chances of America’s poor and minority students. Thus, they conclude, "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."