New Guidelines for High-Stakes School Testing

By Linda Orlando

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) recently released a statement issuing guidelines for school district leaders and policy makers to consider when instituting high-stakes tests for school children in their districts. Although these leaders usually conduct high-stakes testing with good intentions, they need to take care to evaluate the potential of these tests to cause serious harm rather than improve education for children.

Possible negative outcomes of high-stakes tests can include such things as increasing the risk of students failing or dropping out; blame or punishment being dealt to teachers for not having enough resources to prepare students for testing; or distorting curriculums or instruction methods if the overriding goal of classroom instruction becomes the attainment of high test scores rather than learning.

The AERA is an international professional organization consisting of almost 25,000 educators and school administrators, in addition to other education-related researchers and professionals. Its purpose is to promote educational research and its practical application to schools and how students are educated, and the long-term ramifications of educational methods. The AERA considers high-stakes tests to be assessments that can carry serious consequences—such as merit raises or bonuses for teachers, increased budgets or resources for schools, and the retention or denial of high school diplomas for graduating seniors.

To avoid negative outcomes from high-stakes tests, the guidelines recommended by the AERA’s statement include the following conditions:

• Decisions that affect an individual student’s life chances or educational opportunities should not be based on the score of one test alone.
  
• Tests must be fair to both students and teachers. School districts should provide adequate resources for students to learn the content of tests, and teachers should be assessed to ensure that they meet the standards for providing such education or provided with retraining.
  
• The tests must be aligned with the curriculum. The content of the test and the cognitive processes required to take the test should adequately represent the curriculum the student is being taught.
  
• Although "teaching to the test" is inevitable because schools are offered incentives based on test scores, schools should introduce different tests on a regular basis.
  
• If high-stakes consequences are imposed for failing the test, school districts must show that the tested components have been incorporated into the curriculum, materials, and instruction before the test was administered.
  
• Students who fail the test must have meaningful remediation opportunities, focusing on the knowledge and skills the test was intended to address, not just the specific questions of the test itself.
  
• Students should have more than one opportunity to pass a test if the scores are used to decide promotion to the next grade or high school graduation, and sufficient time should be provided between testing to ensure that the student has had time to improve on any weaknesses discovered during the first test.

The AERA statement reported that there is evidence that a test score may not adequately reflect a student’s true knowledge or proficiency. A high-stakes policy shouldn’t base the future of a student on the score attained on one test. Rather, students should be give alternate and multiple means to demonstrate their achievements in education.