Opinion Essay 1: Improving Standardized Testing

• In Event: The Future of Measurement and Accountability: A Research-Driven Vision

Abstract

The use of standardized tests in accountability has been criticized on a number of grounds, including that tests disproportionately label schools serving marginalized groups as underperforming (Hegedus, 2018; Schneider, 2017), that there is a lack of transparency about testing content (Zapata-Rivera, 2019), and that testing has an outsized impact on the nation’s schools (McCurrer, 2007). Changes to accountability policy can improve the use of standardized testing as a tool to evaluate student learning. This essay offers several recommendations to improve the use of standardized testing for assessment purposes. In particular, the essay offers policy recommendations to provide increased flexibility for states and avoid the unintended consequences associated with over-specifying approaches and methods to accountability:
Policy Recommendation 1: States should increase requirements regarding transparency of assessment content.
Policy Recommendation 2: States should actively involve historically marginalized groups in test design, development, and evaluation.
Policy Recommendation 3: Congress should clarify that the purpose of large-scale standardized tests is to monitor and evaluate student learning, not for diagnostic and formative purposes – thereby avoiding the harmful mixed messages due to conflation.
Policy Recommendation 4: Congress should allow states to lighten the footprint of summative standardized testing.

Authors

• Derek C. Briggs, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Scott F. Marion, Center for Assessment
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stephen G. Sireci, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author