Convention speakers
cautioned against basing students' academic futures solely on
standardized tests and suggested alternatives.
BY DEBORAH SMITH
Monitor staff
Educators often rely on standardized tests to make any
number of important decisions about their students, including
whether to let students graduate, enter a gifted- or
special-education program or move to the next grade. However,
the playing field for such high-stakes tests may not be level
for all students, said psychologists at APA's 2001 Annual
Convention.
No matter how well a test is constructed, there is concern
that many schools use such test results in inappropriate ways
and that the tests themselves fail to adjust for America's
increasingly diverse student population, especially minority
students, those from low-income families and those who do not
speak English as their first language, the speakers explained.
Forty-seven states have established standards for what
students should know and be able to do, said educational
researcher Linda Darling Hammond, PhD, and about half use
tests to make promotion, graduation and other crucial
decisions. While psychologists and educators have developed a
document--the "Standards for Educational and Psychological
Testing"--stating that schools shouldn't rely on only one test
to make such decisions, "we have almost half of the states in
this country violating the standards the profession has set
for the uses of tests," said Hammond.
"These [policy-based] tests have substantial unintended
consequences," explained Hammond. For example, even though the
percentage of students passing high-stakes achievement tests
has increased, Hammond warned psychologists such numbers may
be misleading: In many schools, the percentage of students
passing tests has increased only because poorly performing
students are not included in the pool, she said. To make test
averages look better, some schools might, for instance, hold
students back or exclude or separately report the scores of
special education students.
Studies have shown, said Hammond, that such methods leave
poorly performing students even worse off. For example,
researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research have
found that students who were held back had significantly
higher dropout rates and lower achievement than those of
similar ability who were promoted.
"Although the reforms were popular, the policy-makers and
educators simply ignored a large body of research showing they
would not produce academic gains and would increase dropout
rates," said Hammond. "This was a policy with no probable
educational benefits and large costs. The benefits were
political and the costs were borne by at-risk students."
Inappropriate use of test results isn't the only problem.
The tests themselves often fail to take into account the
increasingly diverse students who take them, said the
presenters. Just one example, given by George Mason University
psychologist Jack A. Naglieri, PhD, are tests that use English
vocabulary and cultural-specific knowledge to measure
intelligence. Such tests measure achievement and learning,
Naglieri argued, not intelligence. For instance, a talented
student who speaks Spanish as her first language may do poorly
on vocabulary portions of an intelligence test, potentially
compromising her gifted-education placement.
"It's really inappropriate to have content that puts
certain groups at disadvantages," Naglieri said. His research
has shown that when children's intelligence is measured
without achievement-based items, minority students score
significantly higher--"which has very important implications
for dealing with the problem, for example, of
over-representation of African-American children in [special
education] classes."
Even though standardized testing isn't perfect, tests
should still be used, said some speakers, since properly
developed and used tests provide critical measures of
students' progress. In fact, the testing standards that APA
helped develop (available at www.apa.org/pubinfo/testing.html)
explain that appropriate testing can be key in identifying
lower-performing students and schools so that they can get the
extra resources they need.
In addition, there's much that educators and psychologists
can do now to level the playing field. Instead of
reconstructing tests, educators and psychologists should focus
on learning how to be culturally sensitive when selecting and
administering tests, adapt tests to students' needs and assess
their own biases when interpreting the results, said
University of Texas at Galveston psychologist Freddy A.
Paniagua, PhD.
To test general knowledge, for example, testers could ask
students to tell them the colors of the flag in their country,
instead of just asking about the American flag. And to prevent
what Paniagua calls student "thought blocking"--difficulty
translating what they're thinking in their native language
into spoken English--the instructor should use the language of
the student.
Making adaptations such as these is becoming increasingly
important, explained University of St. Thomas, Houston,
psychologist Kurt F. Geisinger, PhD, because of the nation's
changing demographics. From 1999 to 1995, 43 percent of the
2.8 million immigrants to the United States were Hispanic, 25
percent white (mostly Eastern Europeans), 24.5 percent Asian
and 7 percent black--and about 90 percent of these individuals
don't speak English as their first language, if at all, said
Geisinger.
Assessing those students with tests that do not take into
account their acculturation puts them at a serious
disadvantage, the psychologists said.
But in Hammond's eye, the best solution to biased testing
would be to follow the model of states like Nebraska,
Minnesota and Connecticut--three of the highest achieving
states in the country--that conduct performance-based
assessments, instead of relying solely on high-stakes tests.
In general, these assessments, scored by multiple teachers,
look at samples of students' work, take into account
behavioral observations and measure whether students have
learned the material covered in course syllabi.
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