Does testing lower test scores?

Applying pressure to teachers through evaluations based on standardized tests leads to worse test scores, a 1990s study found. Does this mean that trying to use “accountability” to improve teaching actually does the opposite?

In 1999, Alfie Kohn, a prolific author on education and childhood psychology, wrote a book on the then-nascent educational reform movement. He gave a talk on it that October, discussing standardized testing. Recently a 2½ minute video clip from that talk has been circulating.

Kohn discusses a study from the early ‘90s where some researchers in Colorado divided teachers and students into two groups. Both the had to teach the students to perform a task. Teachers in one group were just asked to help the students understand the task. In the other, they were told that students would take a standardized test after the lesson, and the teachers judged on the scores.

Despite having the same resources and a greater sense of “accountability,” the students performed worse on the test than students in the first group.

Kohn concludes that the sense of “accountability”, the pressure to get children to perform on a given exam as opposed to a more holistic evaluation of their skills, hampers teachers’ ability to educate their students.

The study itself is compelling, but also misses a key element. The teachers in the second (testing-aware) group didn’t get any training about the test. Neither were the control group teachers, of course, but the testing group teachers felt significant pressure from the researchers to get the children to achieve high marks. In a real-world situation, the teachers would have not only the pressure but also the reassurance from training.

At the same time, there’s an important point here with all of the emphasis on test scores in evaluating individual teachers’ merit, pay, and even employment. Fear and pressure may indeed inhibit teaching. That might not be a reason to have no “accountability,” but the point remains and is a factor policymakers need to consider.

Kohn also argues a broader point, that schools need to develop students’ critical faculties, not just teach specific skills. We want students to understand number theory and not simply trigonometry; or literary theory and criticism, and not just the plot of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

It’s hard to evaluate that point because we really don’t understand cognition all that clearly yet. Skills are undoubtedly important, and with a school system that manages to graduate illiterate seniors, perhaps it needs to be a higher priority. Still, the broader cognitive skills are vital in an economy that has less and less interest in people who have been trained to perform on demand without enquiry or curiosity.

Perhaps this is a form of the tension between adequacy and excellence. Can a curriculum and pedagogy successfully teach the bottom student to read, and the average student to think? If so, why isn’t it happening now? And, as this video seems to suggest, are we sacrificing the schools’ ability to do so, simply in order to measure whether they are?