What Do ‘Better Tests’ Look Like?
By Tim Walker
As U.S. schools prepare to leave bubble tests behind to enter a new era in assessments,educators everywhere hope and expect that lawmakers and districts get it right. After a decade of punitive, narrow high-stakes testing, educators and parents have had just about enough. So what are the lessons we have learned from testing? Probably too many to count, most educators might tell you. Rand Education, however, recently waded into years of research to identify and analyze the key issues and answer two fundamental questions: How has testing influenced instructional practice, and what conditions and policies have will make the impact of new assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards more positive for teachers and students? In the report, “New Assessments, Better Instruction?”, Rand identified major ways testing has affected classroom instruction, including changes in curriculum content and emphasis, allocation of time and resources across different pedagogical activities, and teacher-student interactions.
The curriculum has been altered in a variety of ways – a narrower content focus, favoring one specific skill-set over another, and changes in the sequence of topics. “While reduction in emphasis on social studies,