How can standardized tests improve education?

 

How can standardized tests improve education?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Standardized testing requirements are designed to hold teachers, students, and schools accountable for academic achievement and to incentivize improvement. They provide a benchmark for assessing problems and measuring progress, highlighting areas for improvement.

Future of Testing in Education: Effective and Equitable Assessment Systems

This analysis of testing in schools shows what the current debate gets wrong, and how educators and policymakers can create a future where assessments are a more effective part of the teaching and learning system.

Introduction and summary

Assessments are a way for stakeholders in education to understand what students know and can do. They can take many forms, including but not limited to paper and pencil or computer-adaptive formats. However, assessments do not have to be tested in the traditional sense at all; rather, they can be carried out through teacher observations of students or portfolios of students’ work.

Regardless of form, when assessments are well designed and a component of a system of teaching and learning that includes high-quality instruction and materials, they are part of the solution and not a source of the problem. Thus, debates on whether or not to assess students fail to create a worthwhile discussion about testing in schools and how to make assessments better.

When they are well built, standardized and nonstandardized assessments play a useful role in providing educational equity — that is, helping all students achieve at high levels. Accordingly, this report offers an alternative to the argument that all assessments are harmful: an idea of what role all assessments should play in education and the federal and state policy structure needed to make this a reality.

What is an academic standard?

An academic standard is what a student should know and be able to do in a particular subject.3 For example, a second-grade student in math should know the ones and tens places in double-digit numbers.

Teachers are required to teach these standards and can use a wide variety of instructional materials and approaches to guide their students’ learning. Thus, while federal law requires states to have the same academic standards for all students within the state, given the different levels of quality of instructional materials and practices, not all students have the same opportunity to learn and master those standards.

Assessments — in particular, one annual standardized assessment of all public school students in reading and math — became the law of the land starting in 2001 with the renewal and renaming of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as the No Child Left Behind Act. The rationale for this policy is to promote equity in educational opportunity by measuring how well the public education system teaches students to master a state’s academic standards in these subjects.

Despite this laudable goal, federally required assessments are at times criticized because America’s students have made little progress since 2001 and their results correlate with race and socioeconomic status. However, the reality remains that one assessment alone is insufficient to solve the problem of inequity in education. That is because state standardized assessments look back at the end of the year and evaluate whether students learned the state’s academic standards in reading and math. They are not designed to provide information to guide teachers’ daily interactions with students.

This type of high-quality information, as well as professional development in how to use student data effectively, is needed to drive learning forward. Thus, the state assessment must be part of a broader system of assessments that produce data that can evaluate, inform, and predict learning to help achieve ed

The Center for American Progress found that while some of the criticisms of assessments — the annual state standardized assessment in particular — are valid and must be addressed, not all of them have merit. Too often, the criticisms tend to suggest that all standardized testing is harmful or not useful.

Still, improvement at the national scale is needed. The level of research and innovation required to make assessments effective can only be achieved through federal investment and programs. For example, federal policies should invest more in assessment development, through the pilot authorized in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and through existing assessment funding programs in that law.

The federal government can play an important role in researching assessment design and understanding where and how it has a disparate impact on students. Finally, the federal government should use its resources to help ensure that teachers and school leaders become masters of local assessment development and use so that they have the data they need — when they need it — to guide student learning. And for their part, state policies should develop well-thought-out systems of assessments that are based on the state’s learning standards and curriculum.

What are standardized assessments and what purpose do they serve?

Large-scale standardized assessments are just one type of assessment used in schools, with two main purposes: The first is used to predict student performance against a set of benchmarks, while the second is used to understand how many of the test’s benchmarks students reached at the end of the year. That is, standardized assessments can be designed to be predictive or evaluative.

A standardized assessment presents test-takers with the same questions or the same types of questions and is administered and scored in the same way.1 Designed to provide consistent results, standardized tests allow for comparisons between students in a single year and over time.

Standardized assessments play a prominent role in education in the United States; all public school students must take assessments in reading and math each year in grades three through eight as well as once in high school.2 These tests measure what students know and can do against common state-developed, grade-level standards.

3 technical qualities of assessments required by federal law

This text box provides definitions of validity, reliability, and comparability in assessments and why they matter:6

• Validity refers to how accurately and fully a test measures the skills it intends to measure. For example, if an algebra test includes some geometry questions, that test is not a valid measure of algebra.
• Reliability refers to the consistency of the test scores across different testing sessions, different editions of the test, and when different people score the exam. Reliability indicates how consistently the test measures the knowledge and skills it should as well as ensures that it is not measuring error.
• Comparability allows for the comparison of test scores even if students took the test at different times, in different places, and under different conditions. For example, test developers will design a test that may be administered via computer or via paper and pencil to account for these differences so results can be compared.

These requirements help ensure apples-to-apples comparisons between the results of the test given on different days and under different conditions.

A state assessment’s technical qualities are one tool to prioritize equity because they help ensure test results can answer the question, “How well are all students meeting a state’s college- and career-ready standards in reading and math and growing in their knowledge?” Here, “college- and career-ready” means that when students meet or exceed the academic standards in reading and math, they qualify to enroll in credit-bearing courses in college. They do not need to take remedial classes to make up for unfinished learning needed for credit-bearing courses.

Standardized tests negatively impact education

Creativity crash

A long-standing trend of “teaching to the test” has become widespread in the US, which narrows teachers’ focus on only teaching subjects that will help students perform well on standardized tests. Yet, studies have shown that students are more successful when focused on learning rather than on exam performance. According to the National Council of Teachers of English, subjects such as art, social studies, foreign languages, and music have been sidelined, as they are generally not tested on. In this vein, tests like the SATs — which only test for math and reading — don’t account for students’ strengths in other areas of learning, and only encourage a narrowing of the high school curriculum. These tests should be an evaluation tool for students’ overall intellect instead of only evaluating their test-taking abilities.

Not worth the cost

Standardized tests are astronomically expensive, using taxpayer dollars that could be put to better use. A study found that standardized tests cost some states over $1.7 billion a year. America’s school system suffers from severe inequality. There are schools all over America that are in dire need of updated materials, funding for teachers, school psychologists, more after-school programming, etc., which a Rutgers University study shows as having a positive impact on student achievement. Instead, this money is currently going towards student assessments and taking away essential resources from which students would highly benefit. Additionally, tests like the SATs may be biased towards those students who come from money; if they can afford to go to an expensive school or prep course, and if they have more time to study because they don’t have to work, then they will most likely perform better on such tests.

Taking it out on the teachers

Teachers’ success is partially measured by their students’ scores on standardized tests. However, these scores are dependent on all of the students’ teachers combined — not just on a singular teacher’s performance. Studies have long shown that standardized test scores are not a good predictor for teacher effectiveness, yet most states use them as evaluative tools for teachers. In fact, before the pandemic, states like New York proposed to increase the weight of this tool in evaluating teacher performance to 50%. Such a system that punishes and rewards teachers based on test scores won’t contribute to better education for students.

Standardized tests improve education

Equal opportunity

Standardized tests ensure the education level in America is up to par — for everyone. The US’s Every Student Succeeds Act, which began in 2016, requires states to use proficiency on standardized exams as a method of holding elementary, middle, and high schools accountable for their student’s success.

This was intended to close the gap between minority and poverty-stricken students with those from higher-income families. Not only do standardized tests allow every student to learn the same material as their peers in other schools, but state funding laws incentivize schools to ensure every student does well on these exams.

As Washington State’s Senator Patty Murray once said about education laws, “We know that if we don’t have ways to measure students’ progress, and if we don’t hold states accountable, the victims will invariably be the kids from poor neighborhoods, children of color, and students with disabilities.”

Objective measure

Regarding university admissions, it’s important to have an objective measure by which to evaluate applicants, especially regarding scholarship applications and determining academic placement. This is where standardized tests are beneficial, given that personal interviews and demographic information automatically subject evaluations to bias and human error.

Colleges and universities need some sort of unbiased tools with which to screen applicants. These tests help place students in the appropriate place of learning by removing bias from the equation. The SATs are not perfect, but they provide a good service in that vein. The SATs (and other standardized tests) are largely comprised of multiple-choice questions and scored by machines, and thus provide objective, statistically reliable criteria through which to compare student success. The SATs also show students’ proficiencies in a narrow focus instead of having their entire academic career come under the microscope.

Helps students succeed?

Standardized tests didn’t appear anywhere; there is evidence that they teach students important skills. In his book “Defending Standardized Testing,” Dr. Richard Phelps presents his findings after analyzing 100+ years of research on standardized tests and concludes that 93% of studies have shown standardized tests as having a positive influence on student achievement. Additionally, cognitive studies have found that test-taking in general helps students retain information long-term.