Tes Focus On… High-stakes Testing

When teachers and schools are under intense pressure to get results, how can we know if a jump in attainment represents a real leap in learning? Daniel Koretz warns IrenaBarker that the more we tie assessments to accountability, the less reliable they become

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The more you tell people they are going to be accountable for a given metric, the less you can trust that metric,” according to DanielKoretz, Henry LeeShattuck ResearchProfessor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In an education system that often appears completely obsessed with high-stakes tests – and that holds up schools achieving the best exam results as exemplars – his comment will be music to the ears of some teachers, while others will scoff.

Either way, Koretz has done his homework: a former elementary school teacher, he has spent much of the past 30 years researching and writing about high-stakes tests, including in his books measuring Up and The Testing Charade. All that work has left him sceptical of their reliability.

“The more the people involved in the tests perceive pressure to raise scores, the more likely they are to change their behaviour; for example, by teaching to the test or – at the extreme end of the spectrum – cheating,” he says.

It is important to note that the notion of “high-stakes” is fluid, Koretz adds.

“There are a lot of people who believe that a test is only high-stakes if there are concrete and tangible sanctions and rewards [such as job security]…but the research is pretty clear that you don’t need those concrete sanctions and rewards. All you need is to create a system in which teachers think that test scores are what’s going to matter for them.”

‘You can’t trust the results’

A mere “strategy of applied anxiety” where a school emphasises the importance of test scores regularly is enough to make tests high-stakes, Koretz explains.