How Standardized Tests Shape—and Limit—Student Learning A Policy Research Brief 1

A Policy Research Brief produced by the National Council of Teachers of English

How Standardized Tests Shape—and Limit—Student Learning

In ThIs Issue Changing the Nature of Teaching

Narrowing the Curriculum

Limiting Student Learning

This publication of the James R. Squire Office of Policy Research offers updates on research with implications for policy decisions that affect teaching and learning. Each issue addresses a different topic, and all issues can be found at www.ncte.org.

The term standardized tests is often heard along with high-stakes. Standard-ized tests are administered, scored, and interpreted in a consistent way, so that the performances of large groups of students can be compared. They are not in themselves high-stakes, but they are often used for high-stakes purposes such as determining which students will pass or graduate, which teachers are fired or given raises, and which schools are reorganized or given more funding. Heard less frequently are discussions of the effects of high-stakes standardized tests on student learning. Research shows that these effects include changing the nature of teaching, narrowing the cur-riculum, and limiting student learning. English language arts (ELA) teachers and their students feel these effects with special force because literacy is central in most standardized tests.

Changing the Nature of TeachingOne of the effects of the increased number and heightened stakes of stan-dardized tests is that the roles played by teachers have changed. Specifical-ly, teachers’ institutional tasks have increased because they are expected to take up work related to testing in addition to their regular teaching duties. Institutional tasks include:

• collecting,organizing,andanalyzingdataassociatedwithtests

• groupingandregroupingstudentsaccordingtotestperformance

• developingverticalarticulationofthecurriculumtoalignwithtests

• coordinatingstudents’assignments,basedontestscores,toremedialprograms

As a result of spending more time on institutional tasks like these, teach-ers have less time for instruction in their own classrooms. One study found that teachers lose between 60 to 110 hours of instructional time in a year because of testing and the institutional tasks that surround it.

Instruction is also diminished by mandatory curricula that have been developed to prepare students for standardized tests. Such curricula require teachers to use prepared materials which they did not develop and which may not address the needs of actual students in their classes. In some cases mandated curricula come with scripted lessons and/or pacing guides that determine when specific content should be taught, leaving teachers limited opportunity to make instructional decisions. Most teach-ers are expected to spend an increasing amount of time on practice tests

2 How Standardized Tests Shape—and Limit—Student Learning A Policy Research Brief

or drill sessions to prepare students for tests. Materials and requirements like these de-professionalize teachers, reduc-ing their authority and autonomy in instruction. Instruc-tional time spent on high-level writing skills such as how to use strategies of invention in writing is replaced by how to perform well on the relatively low-level skills required in standardized tests.

Narrowing the CurriculumStandardized tests narrow the entire curriculum in many schools, often squeezing out subjects such as music, art, foreign languages, and, especially in elementary grades, social studies, because they are not included in tests. For ELA teachers, these tests also lead to subject-specific nar-rowing. ELA teachers are required to focus their instruc-tion on the literacy skills measured on standardized tests. Since reading is more prominent than writing in most tests, teachers spend more time on reading rather than writing, usually focusing on comprehension, not higher-order criti-cal reading skills. Even when English language arts teach-ers deliberately teach beyond the test-based curriculum, important aspects of writing such as revision do not get at-tention, so students read a narrow range of texts and have limited opportunity to learn strategies for and the value of revising, rather than just proofreading, their writing.

Standardized tests also limit the type of writing students do. Many tests of writing include a significant portion of in-direct measures such as multiple-choice and short-answer items that do not require students to write extended prose. These tests encourage teachers to emphasize a test-based approach that focuses on the application of a fixed set of skills, which means that students learn little about pro-cesses of composing and rhetorical dimensions such as audiences and purposes for writing. This limitation is exac-erbated by the increasing reliance of standardized tests on machine scoring. Most prominently, tests developed by the Smarter Balanced (SB) consortium and Partnership for As-sessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) use machine scoring to assess students’ levels of achievement in writing on the Common Core State Standards.

Machine scoring systems can diminish student learn-ing because they tend to prioritize features like mechani-cal correctness and sentence or word length rather than more substantive dimensions of writing. This emphasis on a limited definition of writing is made worse by the fact that some automated systems identify mechanical errors inconsistently or erroneously. Student’s in ELA classes do less high-level learning when instruction is guided by such narrowly focused and capricious systems.

Limiting Student LearningMost important, standardized tests limit student learning because they focus only on cognitive dimensions, ignoring many other qualities that are essential to student success. Research shows, for example, that GED recipients perform about as well as high school graduates on standardized tests but have much worse life outcomes because they often lack important qualities such as curiosity, conscien-tiousness, perseverance, and sociability. ELA teachers could help more students develop these so-called “soft skills” or non-cognitive abilities if they didn’t have to focus on drills for tests. Instead, ELA teachers have to, for instance, cut back on large-scale projects that require perseverance, reduce the number of literary texts that engender the em-pathy necessary to sociability, and limit opportunities for developing student curiosity. Student learning that could lead in positive directions is diminished when tests prevent teachers from helping students develop the noncognitive abilities that support better life outcomes.

Another limitation on student learning results from the negative perceptions standardized tests can give to students about themselves and their own abilities. Stud-ies show that elementary school students can begin to lose their sense of themselves as capable, able to do well in school and graduate, when they see unknown adults as controlling the administration and consequences of the standardized tests they are required to take. Even the very best ELA teachers have difficulty fostering learning in students who do not believe in their own abilities.

Student learning is also limited by testing’s inflexible sorting of students into categories of proficient or not-proficient. It can be very difficult for students designated as not-proficient to imagine themselves as effective readers and writers. This test-generated binary is troubling because it gives no space to the full range of features that comprise effective reading and writing. Students who have literacy abilities that extend beyond but do not fully encompass the narrow band of skills measured by standardized tests may not understand or appreciate their own capacities and become disengaged from school.

Standardized tests have different effects on various populations of students, and they usually lead to signifi-cant limits on learning among poor and minority students. For example, the scores of poor and minority students are often lower than those of middle class whites, and these results can lead to a failure to graduate, particularly when these students attend under-resourced schools. High-achieving minority students, particularly high-achieving African American students, have received relatively little

How Standardized Tests Shape—and Limit—Student Learning A Policy Research Brief 3

The James R. Squire Office of Policy Research

This policy brief was produced by NCTE’s James R. Squire Office of Policy Research, directed by Anne Ruggles Gere, with assistance from Ann Burke, Gail Gibson, James Hammond, Anna Knutson, Ryan McCarty, Chris Parsons, Molly Parsons, Elizabeth Tacke, and Bonnie Tucker.

For information on this publication, contact Lu Ann McNabb, NCTE Policy and Alliance, at lmcnabb@ncte.org or 202-380-3132. ©2014 by the National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permis-sion from the copyright holder. Additional copies of this publication may be purchased from the National Council of Teachers of English at 1-877-369-6283. A full-text PDF of this document may be downloaded free for personal, non-commercial use through the NCTE website: http://www.ncte.org (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).

attention from researchers, but the available evidence indicates that those who do well on standardized tests do not think these assessments are accurate or valid measures of achievement. Rather they are merely a way to “play the game” of school.

English language learners, currently the fastest-growing population within US schools, represent another group whose learning is limited by standardized tests. The results of standardized tests usually determine whether students will receive the designation English language learner and the support services that go with it. Unfortunately, the tests English language learners take are not always valid measures of their ability, and their opportunities to learn are diminished as a result. Instead of receiving the support they need, students are assigned to classes where their learning is hampered because they cannot understand the language being used.

Policy RecommendationsStandardized tests have powerful and often negative ef-fects on student learning, but their negative effects can be reduced by measures such as these:

• Employmultipleassessmentsofstudentachieve-ment so that standardized tests are administered alongside broader, more comprehensive measures of student learning.

• Representstandardizedteststostudentsasonetypeof assessment among several and help students understand how this type of assessment functions.

• Ensurethatthestandardizedtestsbeingusedarevalid and reliable for the populations of students be-ing tested.

• Providespecialaccommodationssuchasallow-ing extra time, dictation, and translators for English language learners and other students with special needs.

Endnotes1 Valli, L. & Buese, D. (2007). The changing roles of teachers in

an era of high-stakes accountability. American Educational Research Journal 44 (3), 519-558.

2 Nelson, H. (2013). Testing more, teaching less: What America’s obsession with student testing costs in money and lost instruc-tional time. New York: American Federation of Teachers.

3 Crocco, M.S. & Costigan, A.T. (2007). The narrowing of curricu-lum and pedagogy in the age of accountability: Urban educa-tors speak out. Urban Education 42 (6), 512-535.

4 Dappen, L. Isernhagen, J. & Anderson, S. (2008). A statewide writing assessment model: Student proficiency and future implications. Assessing Writing 13, 45-60.

5 McCarthey, S.J. (2008). The impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers’ writing instruction. Written Communication 25 (4), 462-507.

6 Brimi, H. (2012). Teaching writing in the shadow of standard-ized writing assessment: An exploratory study. American Secondary Education 41 (1), 52-78.

7 Jeffrey, J.V. (2009). Constructs of writing proficiency in US state and national writing assessments: Exploring variability. Assess-ing Writing 14, 3-24.

8 Perelman, L. (2012). Length, score, time, and construct validity in holistically graded writing assessments. The case against automated essay scoring (AES). In C. Bazerman, C. Dean, K. Lunsford, S. Null, P. Rogers & A. Stansell, et al. (Eds), New Direc-tions in International Writing Research (121-132). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.

9 Herrington, A. & Moran, C. (2012). Writing to a machine is not writing at all. In N. Elliot & L. Perelman (Eds.), Writing Assess-ment in the 21st Century (219-233). New York: Hampson Press.

10 Heckman, J.J. & Kautz, T. (2012). Hard evidence on soft skills. Labour Economics 19, 451-464.

11 Dutro, E. & Selland, M.K. (2012) I like to read but I know I’m not good at it: Children’s perspectives on high-stakes testing in a high-poverty school. Curriculum Inquiry 42 (3), 340-367.

12 Dutro, E., Selland, M.K. & Bien, A.C. (2013). Revealing writing, concealing writers: High-stakes assessment in an urban ele-mentary classroom. Journal of Literacy Research 45 (2), 99-141.

13 Wiggan, G. (2014). Student achievement for whom? High-performing and still “playing the game,” the meaning of school achievement among high achieving African American students. Urban Review 46, 47-492.

14 Solorzano, R. (2008). High stakes testing: Issues, implications, and remedies for English language learners. Review of Educa-tional Research 78 (2), 260-329.