Amrein and Berliners 2002 paper, High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning, should have put an end to high-stakes testing, but it didnt. Their conclusions following an exhaustive study: “What shall we make of all this? 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 Americas 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 Americas poor and many of Americas 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.”
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:38:59 +0000
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