Friday, May 27, 2011

National Testing Push Yielded Few Learning Advances: Report (VIDEO)

National Testing Push Yielded Few Learning Advances: Report (VIDEO)

National Testing Push Yielded Few Learning Advances: Report (VIDEO)

Classroom

First Posted: 05/27/11 02:01 PM ET Updated: 05/27/11 05:27 PM ET

NEW YORK -- Education policies pushing more tests haven't necessarily led to more learning, according to a new National Research Council report.

"We went ahead, implementing this incredibly expensive and elaborate strategy for changing the education system without creating enough ways to test whether what we are doing is useful or not," said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the committee that produced the report.

Heavily testing students and relying on their scores in order to hold schools -- and in some cases teachers -- accountable has become the norm in education policy. The No Child Left Behind Act, the largest piece of education legislation on the federal level, for example, uses performance on math and reading exams to gauge whether schools are failing or succeeding -- and which schools are closed or phased out.

"Incentives are powerful, which means they don't always do what they want them to do," said Kevin Lang, a committee member who also chairs Boston University's economics department. "As applied so far, they have not registered the type of improvements that everyone has hoped for despite the