High-Stakes Exams to Test Higher-Order Skills

by Sara Bernard · 2010-09-09 05:34:00 UTC
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Though they won't be ready until the 2014-2015 school year, here's some potentially good news: the U.S. Department of Education is funding a complete overhaul of current standardized tests. This means that once the $330 million is doled out and the project is developed in collaboration with university professors and testing experts, standardized exams will be nationwide, computer-based, and test "higher-order skills" such as how to synthesize information and conduct research projects.

How they intend to do this is, of course, vague, since all of it has yet to be developed, but what a boon for the education system—standardized tests that might, at last, test something meaningful. The idea is that if these tests are well-designed and electronic, then they'll also be able to quickly spit out student data and give teachers instant feedback about what students are learning throughout the school year.

The development phase is two-pronged, with a Florida-led group of states (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and a Washington-led group of states (the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) essentially competing with one another for the best assessment design. Both will emphasize "performance-based tasks" or problem-solving skills —suggesting, for instance, a real-world simulation of a situation that a student must analyze and solve — and both will be aligned with the Common Core Standards, the national curriculum standards that most states have adopted this summer (hopefully amended somewhat since the last time I checked).

Of course, it's unclear whether these tests will take a thoughtful step forward or simply mirror the testing mania that's taken over the public education system in recent years. Will teachers find them useful, or will they just be another in a long line of mandates that turn class time into test-prep time? Will nationwide standardized tests work better than statewide ones? It's a few years out, but at least on the surface, the initiative seems to be a step in the right direction.

Photo credit: izzymuchted

Sara Bernard is a former staff writer and multimedia producer for Edutopia magazine.
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