New report from Academy of Sciences questions reliance on standardized tests

The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has just issued a report that has been in the works for fifteen years. The authors looked at years of research related to standardized testing and incentive systems, including No Child Left Behind. A PDF summary of the study is available here.

While the authors of the study do not claim that incentives should never be used, they say that the research does not support the idea that increased incentives have led to improved learning.

Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education. (summary, page 5)

They cite many arguments familiar to those who question the wisdom of relying too much on standardized tests. For example, they say that measuring the effects of a program should always be done with a test other than the one which is connected with the incentives. This is to prevent gaming the system, where teachers learn how to make scores go up on their state test, but scores on the national tests (such as NAEP) do not go up.

The summary is worth reading. You can also read about the study in this article from the Huffington Post. Here is a quote from study author Dan Ariely:

"It raises a red flag for education," Ariely said. "These policies are treating humans like rats in a maze. We keep thinking about how to reorganize the cheese to get the rats to do what we want. People do so much more than that."

This reductive thinking, Ariely said, is also responsible for spreading the notion that teachers are in the profession for the money. "That's one of the worst ideas out there," he said. "In the process of creating No Child Left Behind, as people thought about these strategies and rewards, they actually undermined teachers' motivations. They got teachers to care less, rather than more," he added, because "they took away a sense of personal achievement and autonomy."