Assessment Reform: High-Stakes Testing and Knowing the Contents of Other Minds

Abstract

The test has long been considered to be a reliable and valid way for choosing the appropriate members of a population for the most important roles in society – a progressive mechanism for combating favouritism and arbitrariness. A whole apparatus or technology was constructed that was intended to legitimize it. This psycho-metric framework, though continually in a state of flux, has served as a means of support for significant educational programmes in the twentieth century, and continues to underpin subsequent educational reforms throughout the world. This chapter argues that, if an education system introduces testing in which there are significant rewards attached to success in the test both for the individual and the institution in which she works, then there are two consequences. The first is that those knowledge sets, skills and dispositional states which allow this person to do well in tests, and, in particular, high-stakes tests, become the dominant form of knowledge in the curriculum, and the second is that the capacities of a person are transformed over time so that they have more of the characteristics of that dominant form of knowledge. Testers commonly conflate these two forms of knowledge, and in doing so make a number of false assumptions about knowledge and its assessment, with the consequence that these two forms of knowledge become indistinguishable in the minds of policy-makers, educational practitioners, students and other stakeholders.