Testing

Archived Testing Links

Standardized Testing is becoming a critical issue in today's schools. Whether we agree with the how, when or whys of standardized testing, we need to face the fact that it's being required and our kids need to do well on the tests. Below are some links to help evaluate the information we're receiving and better cope with preparing our students for the tests.

A Message from our Director - On Standardized Testing

The News

Rand News Release October 24, 2000: Memo to Reporters and Writers: What Do Test Scores in Texas Tell Us? --To investigate whether the dramatic math and reading gains on the TAAS represent actual academic progress, the researchers compared these gains to score changes in Texas on another test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The RAND team generally found only small increases, similar to those observed nationwide, in the Texas NAEP scores. Meanwhile, the TAAS scores were soaring.

Rand News Release July 25, 2000: Rising Math Scores Suggest Education Reforms Are Working: State Achievement Differences Tied to Spending, Policies -- Rising math scores suggest education reforms are working State achievement differences tied to spending, policies Texas first, California last in test scores of similar students

Evaluating the News / Understanding Testing

The Rand Report - Improving Student Achievement: What NAEP State Test Scores tell Us. and what education researchers have to say about the Rand Report
Comment - Texas Gains on NAEP: Points of Light? by Gregory Camilli of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Comment - The Myth of the Texas Miracle by Walt Haney of Boston College

True or False: The Standardized Test Conundrum - A great set of short articles on standardized testing from The Why Files. These articles are written for use in High School Science/ Math/ Social Studies Classes, but are sophisticated enough to give parents and teachers a good basic understanding of the issues.

Betraying our children Opinion by Arianna Huffington - Rather than reform our schools, Bush's test-centric education bill will lead to game-show-style teaching and unfairly categorize kids as failures.

Assessing Students' Mathematics Learning By Ilene Kantrov - One of two papers in the Issues in Mathematics Education series, this paper explores issues related to both high-stakes and in-classroom assessments in mathematics. Intended for use by schools and teachers, possibly with parents, the paper clarifies common terminology and uses of test scores, and helps guide readers to think about ways of evaluating assessments.

NCTM Position Statements - High Stakes Testing

Math Connections - A standards-based secondary math curriculum. Research results, as reported by external evaluation consultants, from the first group of five schools that began field-testing MATH Connections in the fall of 1993, indicate students successful achievement and positive attitude toward learning and using mathematics.

Test Preparation

Study Guides and Test-Taking Strategies

Preparing For Standardized Tests In Investigations and in other standards-based programs, students are used to explaining their strategies and may not be used to working under tight time constraints. And compared to traditional programs, students focus more on understanding concepts and less on notation and vocabulary. This may pose a problem when teachers face the difficult task of preparing their students for many of the standardized tests. What to do in this situation? Here are some tips and stories gathered from teachers who have been there.

On Standardized Testing
By Karin Wiburg, Co-director, MathStar New Mexico

Before we know it the annual testing frenzy will once again descend on our schools and classrooms. I dream of a day when students will look forward to assessment and enjoy reflecting on and documenting their own progress and when every instructional activity will follow what I call The Nintendo Principle. This principle suggests that every instructional activity have built into it enough feedback so that students always know how they are doing. In the meantime, we are faced with standardized multiple-choice testing and the fact that political leaders and citizens believe in the efficacy of these tests to the extent that life-changing decisions are sometimes made based on the results of these tests. I want to make a couple of comments on standardized testing and then suggest some practical ways for helping kids do better on these inevitable tests. There are ways to turn these lemons into lemonade!

The Limitations of Standardized Tests
One should always view the results of standardized tests with some skepticism. Research suggests that test results can vary widely depending on who gives the test; how a child feels that day; and how test-wise the student is. In general, standardized tests are meant for a broad comparison of programs or schools and for general measures of how groups of students are doing, not for individual student diagnosis.
As most of you know, we are working in the MathStar project to use technology in ways that help students learn by constructing and transforming knowledge. When students engage in learning about mathematics by solving problems and using technology to create presentations or share their findings in class or via the Internet, they are gaining a kind of deep learning that is difficult to evaluate on a multiple- choice standardized test. The results of higher-level learning are probably better demonstrated through performance tasks, exhibitions, and portfolios as well as the students own explanations of what they have learned and how they learned it. However, until these types of assessments are incorporated into our evaluation systems we are stuck with standardized testing. And ironically, the results of this deep thinking actually do improve test results on standardized tests.

Personal Experiences that led to Higher Math Scores
I can point to research (see the MathStar Testing page) and have personal experiences that confirm the fact that thinking deeply about content while using constructivist methods does lead to better test scores. When teaching fourth grade students how to use Logo to demonstrate their understanding of the content of the fourth grade curriculum. I knew their thinking skills were improving (as measured on a cognitive abilities test as well as my observation) but I worried a little about computation skills. Was I doing enough practice? It turned out that students in the Logo group scored in the 90th percentile. I explained this for myself by remembering all the mental math the students had to do as they created Logo products.
Earlier I had I worked as a Chapter 1 math specialist in an inner-city elementary school in Seattle, Washington. I knew the principal was not completely happy with my methods when he visited the room and kids were working in small groups using Unifix cubes and making math games to reinforce the concepts they were studying. However, at the end of the year when all the students I worked with scored above the lower three stanines on the standardized tests the principal came and talked to me.
"How did you do that," he wondered, "whenever I came in your room the kids seemed to be playing."

Actually I did do a ten minute conceptual lesson each day before the kids went to their group activities. I explained to him how I taught conceptually (math concepts rather than just math fact memorization) and provided multiple opportunities for kids to explore and reconstruct the concepts I was teaching using a variety of media from blocks to game making to computers. If they looked happy while learning so much the better.
Test-taking as a way to Teach Cognitive Strategies
In addition to having faith that problem-solving will lead to better test scores, I also decided to consider test-taking as a cognitive thinking activity worth teaching. In the December 1996/January 1997 issue of Educational Leadership Sherry Walton and Kathe Taylor ask, "Why not help children learn to use this testing format to develop new problem-solving strategies and approaches to learning and to showing what they have learned." Their article, "How did you know the answer was boxcar?" (p. 38) suggests specific ways that a teacher can use standardized tests and the skills upon which they depend to engage students in authentic learning. Walton and Taylor thought up the idea two years ago when they studied the results of testing in their district. Predictably, kids in rich and middle-class neighborhoods did well, while kids in poor neighborhoods did poorly. Their guess was that the poor scores were partly the result of many of the kids not understanding how to take tests, being unfamiliar with the format and therefore afraid to try.
They began at one school to put the material they were teaching into a timed, multiple-choice format and then having these students take the test (without any grading consequence) and openly talk about how they approached the questions and why they picked the answer they did. The basic approach was to improve students' problem-solving skills by asking them to examine together and with their teachers what makes a good answer on a multiple-choice test and what strategies are helpful for getting this answer and proceeding through the test efficiently. After this experience kids who had normally been afraid of standardized tests approached them with new confidence. Not only did the test scores in the school improve significantly but the teachers learned a tremendous amount about students' current reasoning abilities and how to help them gain more problem-solving abilities.
I tried these researchers' ideas while a Chapter 1 Math Teacher in another elementary school in Seattle. I took the content of each week's lessons and put them in multiple-choice format on Fridays for a couple of months. We talked together about why the students had answered the questions the way they had. When the kids took the test in the Spring they scored very well. In fact, the scores were so high that the school lost their Chapter 1 funding and I had to move to another school since funding was based on students in the lower three stanines and their's were no longer low enough.

Equity in Testing
There are many equity issues related to testing. A famous example for New Mexico is a question that asks if it can be rainy and sunny at the same time. In fact it can be in this part of the world, but that is not the correct answer. The test may have a cultural or a language bias using words and context not familiar to the test-taker. It may be testing vocabulary instead of math skills or other content knowledge. Most important in equity, however, is the inequity of testing students on something they have not been taught. If the students never had a chance to learn something, it is not fair to test them on it. This is where curriculum alignment comes in. Test scores can be raised (as they were at Lynn Middle School) by making sure that what is being tested is being taught.

The Bottom Line
Finally, the problem with raising test scores is that in low-scoring schools there is usually a large group of students who just don't get it. Mathematically, you can never significantly raise test scores unless you do something dramatically different with these low students. These students probably won't benefit from more of the same. There is evidence that some of the new math curricula like Math Connections (see web site) can help raise test scores for students that have traditionally not done well in math. You might think about trying a different approach to teaching math as well as using the strategies suggested in this paper.
I hope these ideas help you to prepare for this year's standardized tests. Have faith in the newer instructional approaches you are using and consider creating your own multiple-choice test on some of the content you are teaching. You can view testing as an opportunity for kids to develop new thinking strategies.

Direct comments to: mibrown@nmsu.edu

Archived Testing Links
Standardized Testing is becoming a critical issue in today's schools. Whether we agree with the how, when or whys of standardized testing, we need to face the fact that it's being required and our kids need to do well on the tests. Below are some links to help evaluate the information we're receiving and better cope with preparing our students for the tests.
A Message from our Director - On Standardized Testing
The News
	Rand News Release October 24, 2000: Memo to Reporters and Writers: What Do Test Scores in Texas Tell Us? --To investigate whether the dramatic math and reading gains on the TAAS represent actual academic progress, the researchers compared these gains to score changes in Texas on another test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The RAND team generally found only small increases, similar to those observed nationwide, in the Texas NAEP scores. Meanwhile, the TAAS scores were soaring.
	Rand News Release July 25, 2000: Rising Math Scores Suggest Education Reforms Are Working: State Achievement Differences Tied to Spending, Policies -- Rising math scores suggest education reforms are working State achievement differences tied to spending, policies Texas first, California last in test scores of similar students
Evaluating the News / Understanding Testing
	The Rand Report - Improving Student Achievement: What NAEP State Test Scores tell Us. and what education researchers have to say about the Rand Report Comment - Texas Gains on NAEP: Points of Light? by Gregory Camilli of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Comment - The Myth of the Texas Miracle by Walt Haney of Boston College
	True or False: The Standardized Test Conundrum - A great set of short articles on standardized testing from The Why Files. These articles are written for use in High School Science/ Math/ Social Studies Classes, but are sophisticated enough to give parents and teachers a good basic understanding of the issues.
	Betraying our children Opinion by Arianna Huffington - Rather than reform our schools, Bush's test-centric education bill will lead to game-show-style teaching and unfairly categorize kids as failures.
	Assessing Students' Mathematics Learning By Ilene Kantrov - One of two papers in the Issues in Mathematics Education series, this paper explores issues related to both high-stakes and in-classroom assessments in mathematics. Intended for use by schools and teachers, possibly with parents, the paper clarifies common terminology and uses of test scores, and helps guide readers to think about ways of evaluating assessments.
	NCTM Position Statements - High Stakes Testing
	Math Connections - A standards-based secondary math curriculum. Research results, as reported by external evaluation consultants, from the first group of five schools that began field-testing MATH Connections in the fall of 1993, indicate students successful achievement and positive attitude toward learning and using mathematics.
Test Preparation
	Study Guides and Test-Taking Strategies
	Preparing For Standardized Tests In Investigations and in other standards-based programs, students are used to explaining their strategies and may not be used to working under tight time constraints. And compared to traditional programs, students focus more on understanding concepts and less on notation and vocabulary. This may pose a problem when teachers face the difficult task of preparing their students for many of the standardized tests. What to do in this situation? Here are some tips and stories gathered from teachers who have been there.