I just finished finals week. One of the useful by-products of this time for me is the opportunity to read student papers. It becomes a useful way to increase the breadth of the material I normally read. A couple of papers this time dealth with high stakes testing and both papers cited the work of Arizona State Univ. profs Amrein and Berliner. These researchers assumed that any general benefit of high stakes tests would be evident on other standardardized tests administered in the state (ACT, SAT, NAEP and AP). They concluded “evidence from this study of 18 states with high-stakes tests is that in all but one analysis, student learning is indeterminate, remains at the same level it was before the policy was implemented.” This finding raises some interesting questions about what the tests actually accomplish.
