Afferbach NRC Policy Brief & Mallette

When I was reading the Afferbach policy statement on high stakes testing there was not much there that I did not agree with.  I just wonder if so many people, educators, researchers and test producers know that just basing a child’s progress on one test score is not very humane, then why does education keep moving in the direction of more and more high-stakes testing?  I was also thinking while I was reading it about the bit of conundrum that testing presents, because the alternatives mentioned, e.g. “reading assessment should reflect performance over multiple time points with various texts and purposes” and that reading should measure a wide range of skills with a variety of formats and responses”, to do these things right in addition to high-stakes testing is also very expensive.  As it is to make a good test.  If they do this in lieu of high-stakes testing, then all the better, but I just don’t see high-stakes testing going away anytime soon. In this article too, it also mentioned that the test producers/companies warn against using one test as the only assessment of a student.

I also work as a rater for the TOEFL (Test of English as a ForeignLangauge) test, which is a standardized test that all students entering U.S universities who speak English as and additional langauge have to take.  It is a test of academic English for university settings.  The test has gone through major changes over the years and is probably much better today then it was before.  It use to be mostly a grammar based test and then students would enter U.S. classrooms and not know how to speak English very well.  Universities complained and test takers complained and the company continues to work on the test and now it has reading, writing, and a speaking section that are more representative of what a student would do at a University.  They also changed the test from a paper-based test to a computer based test.  Test takers pay the fee for the test($150).  The company almost went broke changing the test to its current format.  I am not a fan of high stakes testing and this is not the only measure that Universities look at for entering international students, however if they do not score a minimum score on the test, they will most likely be denied entrance (although not all universities do that).  I am not advocating here for the TOEFL exam, but I do think it one example of a test that has gone through significant changes to become more representative of the types of academic skills that students need to be successful at a University, that does not mean that students who do well on the test, do well at a University.  This was a little of what Afferbach was calling for in the policy document, that testing needs to be more open, and responsive to stake-holders.  In this case it was universities, test takers and the company.  I think it worked ok at this level for a lot of different reasons, one of them being the government not being involved and policies like NCLB.  Also, test takers pay for the exam, where at school test takers do not pay for the exam.  So, I keep thinking how could standardized tests really be more representative of curriculum that is taught in schools, community involvement in testing, providing parents with comprehensible feedback, giving administrators data related to standards and performance, and I don’t think that test would be possible to make without all resources going towards making that test.  So in the end, in very round about way, I guess I do have a critique of the Afferbach position statement and that is the suggestions in addition to high-stakes testing seem unrealistic.

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