Abstract
The chapter starts with an overview of the widely documented ‘collateral damage’ resulting from the combination of standardized school testing with high-stakes decision making. Such damage takes the form of curriculum reduction (covering only what is tested), reduction of pedagogical strategies (teaching to the test), reduced attention to students that are far below and far above the achievement standards tested, and teacher demotivation and increase of anxiety levels. Since the achievement gains under regimens such as the No Child Left Behind Act in the US have been quite limited, the high-stakes testing strategy is increasingly being questioned. I then inspect the claim that standardized testing is valuable as a source of information on learning, provided testing results are not tied to high-stakes decisions. I argue that this position is also problematic because of the (unintended) detrimental effects on students’ motivation, and their epistemic beliefs. The chapter ends with identifying requirements on twenty-first Century assessment so that it is better aligned with twenty-first Century learning.
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Reimann, P. (2015). Testing Times: Data and Their (Mis-)Use in Schools. In: Proctor, H., Brownlee, P., Freebody, P. (eds) Controversies in Education. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08759-7_4
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