Should Standardized Tests be Used to Assess the Progress of NCLB?

No

By Rich Lehrer, Professor of Science Education

No Child Left Behind seeks to establish an accounting system for student learning in which standardized tests serve as a metric of progress in domains of reading, mathematics, and science. Although standardized tests have well known limitations, the argument is often advanced that they establish thresholds of accountability that any decent educational system should meet. In fact, they are often viewed as tools for equity, and who could possibly be opposed to equity and to accountability?

Despite appearances, this role for standardized tests rests on unexamined assumptions about the goals and roles of assessment. Although we can agree that educators should be accountable for students’ education, just as structural engineers are accountable for the soundness of public works projects, it is less obvious what the nature of that accounting should be. Even a comparatively narrow focus on achievement has several implications.

First, assessment should advance learning. Hence, students and teachers should be participating in an assessment system that provides evidence about how a student is reasoning. Knowledge of student reasoning allows teachers to change the nature of instruction. Assessment assists professional judgment.

Second, assessment should not be a single-shot moment in time (generally, at the end of the school year for NCLB) but rather more continuously embedded within instruction, again with the goal of generating evidence about the nature of student reasoning in a way that can be deployed to improve instruction. Single-shot assessments are rarely of much help in the re-design of instruction.

Third, and aligned with the first two implications, we must ask whose standards are represented by currently available standardized tests. In mathematics, most standardized tests emphasize procedural competence, but the National Research Council (NRC) suggests that procedural competence is but one of five interacting strands that contribute to mathematical proficiency. This emphasis on procedural competence, uncoupled from other forms of mathematical competence, creates a narrow spectrum for what is considered mathematics. The result is often deleterious, as systems of instruction pursue procedural knowledge at the expense of mathematical knowledge. One might respond that state standards documents are prospective remedies for narrow spectrum tests, but a recent NRC report, Systems for State Science Assessment, suggest that state standards documents rarely provide much guidance about the nature of the learning performances one wishes to assess.

Finally, one must consider the technical models that guide the construction of most standardized assessments used for purposes of NCLB. These tests typically employ a model where the quality of learning is indicated by locating an individual along a single dimension of knowledge. An analogy to a ruler would be apt. However, when test items don’t fit this model, they are eliminated. Hence, unlike other sciences, where the adequacy of models are tested in light of natural phenomena, most standardized tests assume that the model of learning is correct and simply cast out the phenomena that don’t fit. Policies are then erected on the basis of this fabrication. An alternative would be to take the time and expense to create standards and measures anchored firmly to learning, so that testing and learning might again mutually profit from the association.