I'm not sure what you are asking here, but in the American public-education system, the major problem, I would argue, is that high-stakes testing has motivated schools to set aside considerable time for teachers to prepare students for the tests. In many districts, this preparation can consume 4-6 weeks in an academic year that already is remarkably short, between 160 and 180 days in many states. The available data, collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, indicate that such testing has not led to improved academic performance.

Yes, this is the kind of reply I would like to have from many more countries around the globe. I have worked in the Middle East for 15 years and only in a few of the countries I worked in understood that there were other options out there besides the one dominant in their land. : 50% of grade for final exam, 50% of grade for the other high stakes exams--and no marks for quizzes and ongoing assessments.

In other words, from some culture, the types of assessments have been narrowed to this format for generations and peoples do not really know any others.

What is worse? In the local Indian school, where I thought my daughter might attend, the school two years ago reverted from a bi monthly exam system to a two-times a year high stakes test practice: 50% for mid-term and 50% for final exam at all grade levels.

Likewise, the department in the college where I now teach, decided to drop any continuous assessment from the semester grade marks this term.

This is why I want a global discussion on what Americans have been discussing for years: How does the system of exams affect learning and teaching?

EXAMPLE LITERATURE ON HIGH STAKES TESTING from approximately 10 countries around the globe. I note that Africa and Middle East are not well-represented in this discussion at all.

[1]

“... In some ways, this problem may be worse than the problems that the high-stakes testing policies are designed to fix. ... These common problems of high-stakes testing programs are quite likely to affect the breadth and depth of student learning. ...”

Amrein, Audrey L. and Berliner, David C. (2003)

“Effects of High Stakes Testing on Student Motivation and Learning”,

Educational Leadership (60:5) F , 32-8.

[2]

“Various studies suggest that test preparation associated with high-stakes testing may artificially inflate achievement, producing gains that are not generalizable to other exams ( [Linn et al., 1990] ,[Shepard, 1990] , [Koretz et al., 1991] , [Koretz and Barron, 1998] …”

Jacob, Bryan A. (2004) “Accountability, incentives and behavior: the impact

of high-stakes testing in the Chicago Public Schools”, Journal of

Public Economics, (89:5,6), 761-796.

[3]

“The very simplified version of the story is that Finnish students have performed at the top in international science comparisons (PISA) for three successive waves of examination starting at the end of the 1990s. Finland has accomplished this success with a relatively short school day and year, with no program of accountability or frequent national standardized testing….”

Leinhardt, Gaea (2012) “Book Review: FINNISH PATIENCE”,

Educational Researcher, (41), 271-273.

[4]

“High-stakes testing has become the object rather than the measure of teaching and learning, negatively affecting curriculum, teacher decision making, instruction, student learning, school climate, and student motivation.”

Gordon, Stephen P. & Reese, Marianne ( 1997) “High-Stakes Testing:

Worth the Price?” Journal of School Leadership, (7 :4) 345-68.

[5]

“Analyses in this study provide evidence to suggest that high school graduation exams increase dropout rates…. Using the best external measures available, evidence exists that high-stakes tests do create the negative, unintended consequences about which critics worry and that make high-stakes high school graduation exams objectionable.”

Amrein , Audrey L. & Berliner, David C. (2002) “An analysis of some

unintended consequences of High Stakes Testing”,

The Great Lakes Center for Education and Research, http://greatlakescenter.org/docs/early_research/pdf/H-S%20Analysis%20final.pdf

[6]

“ A separate literature was also growing on the effects of high-stakes testing in developing ... places available in the upper levels of education makes the stakes much higher ... conditions, the limited time available for English lessons, teacher shortages, problems in communication ...”

Wall, Diana (2000) “The impact of high-stakes testing on teaching and learning:

can this be predicted or controlled?” , System, (28: 4) Dec., 499–509.

[7]

“Thus, ‘students are prepared for the high stakes testing in ways that boost scores on that specific test sub-stantially more than actual achievement in the domains that the tests are intended to measure’ (Koretz et al., 1991, p. 85). ”

Smith, Mary Lee & Fey, Patricia, (2000) Validity and accountability of high

stakes testing”, Journal of Teacher Education, (51:5), 334-344.

[8]

“Approximately one third [of those students facing high stakes testing], however, showed little work effort despite a desire not to be retained. These students faced significantly larger skill gaps and barriers to learning both within and outside school than did their peers with high work effort.”

“Roderick, Melissa & Engle, Mimi (2001) “The grasshopper and the ant:

motivational responses of low-achieving students to high stakes testing”, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, (23:3), 197-227.

[9]

Summary: This book criticizes neo-liberal directions in education in the USA and the UK. It promotes examples of alternative to recent trends in high stakes education.

Hursch, David (2008) High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching

and Learning: The Real Crisis in Education. Critical Education Policy

and Politics #1,

Blue Ridge Summit-USA, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

[10]

“As we demonstrate throughout this book, the logic undergirding high stakes testing policy is unsound. We will show by example after example why strict adherence to this policy does more harm than good. Guided by a little-known but well-documented principle of social science, Campbell’s law, we will argue that high-stakes testing, the cornerstone of NCLB, is paving the way for an educational crisis that threatens to leave our nation behind.”

Nichols, L. and Berliner, David C. (2007)Collateral Damage:

How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, Cambridge,

MA: Harvard Education Press.

[11]

“Already, the national results are being scrutinised, with various states and organisations using them to justify certain narratives about their school systems. But according to Minister for Education Peter Garrett, Australia’s overall school performance in NAPLAN has remained steady since 2008. But why is it, given one of the aims of NAPLAN was to improve literacy and numeracy and with copious amounts of time and money spent on testing, we have not seen results improve overall since 2008?”

Thompson, Greg (2012) “Anxious kids not learning: the real effect of NAPLAN”,

The Conversation,

http://theconversation.edu.au/anxious-kids-not-learning-the-real-effects-of-naplan-9526

[12]

“Why do some children succeed while others fail? The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs… the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. . . Research shows that one of the best predictors of success in life is executive function, a collection of higher order mental abilities that enables people to deal with confusing and unpredictable situations and information.”

Tough, Paul (2012) How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the

Hidden Power of Character, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[13]

“The ‘intense pressure’ is placed on everyone: children, parents, teachers, school leaders, local education administrators, and even local government leaders, but it comes from only one source: college entrance exams. Unless China drastically reforms the college admission system to expand the criteria beyond test scores on a few subjects, it is unlikely that any effort to nurture more creative talents and healthy children will bear fruit.”

Zhao, Yong (2009) Catching Up or Leading the Way, ASCD Learn, Teach, Lead,

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109076.aspx

[14]

“We stopped along the way noting the classical sociological issues of educational equity

facing China, India, Australia, and the island states of the South Pacific. ... High stakes testing and student achievement…”

Luke, Allen & Ismael, Masturah (2007) “Urban Education in Asia Pacific:

Section Editors’ Introduction” in W.T. Pink & G.W. Noblit (Eds.)

International Handbook of Urban Education, Germany: Springer.

[15]

“Using a dendrogram, semistructured interviews surfaced three distinct syndromes describing the dynamics of private tutoring phenomenon, namely, the lean on, pass on, and ride on syndromes of private tutoring.”

de Castro, Belinda V. & Guzman, Allan (2012) “From scratch to notch:

understanding private tutoring metamorphosis in the philippines from the perspectives of cram school and formal school administrators”, Education and Urban Society,

http://eus.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/04/0013124512439888.abstract

[16]

“Unfortunately, this problem of negative washback is widely reported in relation to high-stakes

testing across APEC economies, including Canadian schools, often to little effect. ... Hong Kong,.. India…”

Duff, Patricia A. (2008) “Foreign language policies, research and

educational possibilities”, Apec Education Symposium.

[17]

Research “revealed how the poor labour market outcomes for youth and the high stakes testing at the end of secondary schooling distort the incentive environment for education in Egypt…”

Ibrahim, Solava (2011) “A Tale of Two Egypts: contrasting state-reported

macro-trends with micro-voices of the poor”, Third World Quarterly,

(32:7) 1347-1368.

[18]

“…she is rightfully critical of standardized high-stakes testing such as ...

derived from a survey study conducted representing students from different countries of origin ...”

Gonzalez, Virginia (2004) Second Language Learning: Cultural Adaptation

Processes of International Graduate Students in American Universities,

University Press of America.

[19]

“Students are most often expected to acquire, rather than construct, knowledge and demonstrate acquired knowledge through high-stakes exams. ... The real test of this course is its sustainability over time. Much of the course's success depends upon the teacher, as noted. For other teachers to apply CSCL tools such as Fle4 and collaborative knowledge-building methods such as FCL, they must have sufficient buy-in, available preparation time, technical skill, and knowledge about collaborative knowledge building.”

Pocaro, David S. & al-Musawi, Ali Sharaf (2011) “Lessons learned from

adopting computer-supported collaborative learning in Oman”,

Educause Review Online, http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/lessons-learned-adopting-computer-supported-collaborative-learning-oman

[20]

“I see so much testing in the world, and see how badly most of it is done. I also see the faith many people put in tests and test results, and the consequences for people when test results are used to make decisions about their lives.”

Templer, Bill (2004) High stakes testing at high fees: Notes and Queries on

the English proficiency market, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies

( 2: 1), http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=21

Worse than all of the above mentioned is that high stakes testing tends to have psychological impacts that negatively impact on the full spectrum of learners, from reducing efficacy and resilience in slower learners (and a consequent inequity in the system) to narrowing of focus in better performers on standards rather than the learning itself, to severe impacts on suicide rates in some cases.

Great summary of cognitive effects, Mark.

Here is a reprint from a comment on another discussion:

Hello to all,

@ Kevin Stoda, partially agree with you. From the point of view of educational administration should be indicators to be pursued. I do not see a problem systems being evaluated, but some things need to be clear: 1) tests do not represent the quality of education (in the broadest sense of the term), 2) tests measure aspects very specific (often very limited even though sophistication involved in its preparation, correction and calculation of student performance), 3) the aims of education (even in the broad sense) can not be confused with the objectives of the assessments and these should not be taken by them; 4) from the standpoint of educational management goals there (rights of citizens) to be guaranteed by the state (quality of education) and under which aspects of society should receive an accounting; 4) in countries such as Brazil (certainly not other countries have such problems, such as Finland itself, cited by you) that the inequality of the educational system in providing a quality education is very large, in which inequalities in performance between students are also very huge (iniquity of the system) and a basic right to a quality education is still only a goal that we are pursuing, the tests may indicate some important things for us.

Tests (I'm talking about large-scale assessments made by the State) can always indicate something, but I think the importance of testing - whether in Brazil or any other country - should certainly be qualified and these should not be the ultimate goal of the process education.

On the other hand, there are skills and competencies in which there is a broad consensus on what are, what is expected of a student in particular levels of education. In countries with very unequal as Brazil, monitoring (to intervene more appropriately in the system), from assessments and tests that attempt to measure how social expectations (social demands) for education are (or not) being met has become an important tool in our educational policy. I recognize that many adjustments need to be made in the evaluation models, in which we can assess and, especially, the use made of the results of these tests and the impact that these results may have on teachers.

Thus, from the point of view of the management of the systems that we know if we are hitting where we are targeting, or at least (because the tests are limited, as I said) if we are passing close to where we want to go and it is not very easy.

Only here in Belo Horizonte (and we are only the sixth most populous city in Brazil) have almost 200,000 students accountable for social outcomes of municipal education. There are still schools administered by the State of Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte to which it belongs) and should reach approximately the same number of students cited (and I am speaking only of our school - nine years of our early education system) only in Belo horizonte. There is also the high school and university graduates, who are not under municipal jurisdiction.

Said all this just to justify the use of the tests, but certainly I think his place in the educational system, its importance, objectives and limits should be well understood by teachers, educational managers (policy makers) as well as the society in general.

Maybe in some countries this stuff is no longer needed but in countries as unequal as Brazil constitution of basic rights such as education (I speak of education for all) we can not ignore the evaluations and large-scale testing, including comparisons of our results with the results of other tests in countries such as PISA, for example, located in the educational standards globally and in which there is a general consensus that must be global.

A fraternal embrace,

Sergio Silva

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_skills_must_21st_century_teachers_have_to_promote_high_quality_learning?cp=re65_x_p2&ch=reg&loginT=RsCIU8ETC0B8iyA_wIEmLmCeW4NuzVuTjBycBC4gVvM%2C&pli=1#view=51b83093d11b8b915d70f251

Here is my comment which is referred to by Sergio above. I would be interested to see what is happening in terms of balance between teaching and testing in your country.

In India, the Middle East, and in many other lands (outside of Finland) a hyperfocusedness on testing (and often bad concepts of testing) prevail.

Unless teachers become advocates of their own domain to a greater degree, much of their work and training may be unsupported in the system they are active in. This means that a greater number of teachers must become better activists and not have bad evaluations, bad usages of benchmarks, and negative impacts of testing hurt student achievement and dreams early on. T

his is a major issue in development globally right now and has been in some countries for centuries. However, until now too few have been willing to look into the mirror and see how distorted our teaching and training has become over the decades due to evaluation constraints pushed on us by society and bad ideas about testing that envelop the atmosphere we working in.

Mark Gould wrote in response to Sergio:

Sergio, you have described the issues around testing thoroughly, except for one issue. Results of testing can be represented differently and those differences are important to the learner. Simplistically, results can be represented as 'what was done badly' or 'what was done well'. Results can also be represented as 'How complex the responses were'. Results can also be represented as a 'comparison with expected', such as giving a standard to the test. In Australia, we favor A, B, C, D or E for this type of representation, or my particular favorite is representing results as 'how far along a continuum of achievement' a student is.

Each representation has positive and negative attributes, however, my experience over 20 years of teaching is that the representation that best supports the psychology of the learner is the one that should be used.

Unfortunately for me (and learners) most governments do not seem to agree with me.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_skills_must_21st_century_teachers_have_to_promote_high_quality_learning?cp=re65_x_p2&ch=reg&loginT=RsCIU8ETC0B8iyA_wIEmLmCeW4NuzVuTjBycBC4gVvM%2C&pli=1#view=51b83093d11b8b915d70f251

"Sergio, Mark, it is all a matter of the results one is prepared for. Assessment has achieved a level that, I very much doubt, the average education stake holder is prepared to deal with, emotionally, logically. So, how are we defining "high quality learning" today?" wrote Jonathen Edwards.

Jonathan, could you back up and indicate in a paragraph or more what you mean exactly by " it is all a matter of the results one is prepared for. "

It is provocative and evocative. However, many participants (including myself) desire to see the load of thoughts behind the comments, i.e. in order to compare better to our own teaching and testing cultures where we have lived and worked.

I agree with Mark Gould that Bands of Achievement (or Excellence or Mastery) or how far along a continuum a learner is --BOTH might be better for all of us in most evaluation situations.

The reason for this is that WITH any one set of evaluations, the student or teacher may fall a grade or jump a grade, but over time (within the range noted on a band) the achievement level note should be reflecting that which actual achievements are likely to be at for the performer measured.

Today, too many peoples are hyperfocused on numbers only, which skews away from holistic evaluative elements and even reduce reliability of many intrinsic facets of learning, mastery, and achievement over time by focusing some students (and faculties) too much on the trees instead of the entire forest--or visa versa.

Marc Gould added another web discussion point on this topic:

In Queensland, Australia, There has been a 30 year history of trusting teachers to make reasonable judgments of student performance within syllabi based in generic skills valued in society. This trust is maintained in 2 ways:

* A moderation process where groups of peers compare samples of student work against state wide standards (described in generic terms), and

* research designed to test consistency of judgment that found that in general teachers could judge student achievement (on a 5 point scale) as consistently as statewide tests.

In my 30 years of teaching, I have been involved in both of these processes and am convinced that with good will and trust, standards are maintained in this system as rigorously as under a standardised testing regime. As someone mentioned in a comment, there are issues of corruption that need to be monitored, but when the system is transparent and developed according to research, this problem is minimised.

Someone else mentioned that society should be wary of teachers who are afraid of testing. This is true but only if the fear is of having bad practices found out. Personally, I AM afraid of testing, but not for me, for those students, as has been stated regularly above, that 'do not do well' at testing. If even one student in a cohort is disadvantaged by a system, then that system should be re-examined.

Sergio, I understand your point about needing to know whether our teaching is successful in helping our students be successful or not, however, there are so many points of weakness in the statement. WHO decides the list of skills? How are they measured? Is the measurement correlated effectively against future success?

This last is a personal favorite of mine. I have seen students who were notional failures at a point in time, decide that they could change, and so became successful in 1 or 2 years of commitment on their part. If, as it appears to me, this commitment on the part of the students is the most important thing in education, then the correlation between standardised testing and future achievement is spurious at best. The measure as it appears to me, is of a student's commitment to learning and it is that commitment that should be fostered by whatever means possible.

There are pedagogical, psychological and sociological parameters in the success of any student, and to maximise each student's as well as society's outcomes, we must take note of each of them. Standardised testing serves some purposes, but it also tends to bias future success against any student with an existing deficit and so has for me, too many negatives to outweigh the positives. There MUST be other systems that meet all of the needs of quality education systems.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_skills_must_21st_century_teachers_have_to_promote_high_quality_learning?cp=re65_x_p2&ch=reg&loginT=gNl1baO_PyfHoUq5sIct1dvcJLLAFce-TDMeBkDrf_s%2C&pli=1#view=51c8e72cd3df3e5778c1f109

Hi, Dear Aysha Bey

Thank you Aysha for your comment about high stakes testing. In Jordan we apply the Examination for Second Secondary known " Al-Tawjeehi" test

and my dissertation Ph.D. in 2005 was "The Effect of General Secondary Certificate Examination for Second Secondary Scientific Stream on The mathematics Curriculum Implementation in Jordan

qualitative study, really, were is a high stakes test, the instruction the instruction will directed to the test, or as popham say " item teaching". and also as Madus : If there is high stake test, the teaching will be to the test. any how, Al-Tawjeehi test, as i saw destroyed and distorted mathematics curriculum. And math teachers teach what they expect of the questions which included in the test.

Dear Aysha

We wait the final acceptance soon of our study from Dirasat journal . I well send the abstract for you

best regards

Ibrahim

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_skills_must_21st_century_teachers_have_to_promote_high_quality_learning?cp=re65_x_p3&ch=reg&loginT=FaZIFLKcjgjInF7vSMLZnnBRUFRdbWlZIpTI4P_c8aQ%2C&pli=1#view=51cc96a0d3df3e4a607052e9

I agree completely with Mark's comments about high-stakes testing and teaching to the test. In fact, throughout most of the U.S., one of the chief problems of all K-12 education is teaching to the test. I live and work in Alabama and can testify to high school teachers being told to teach nothing outside the test parameters. As a result, universities now have students who know discrete facts but lack any sense of depth or continuity, core principles whether math, science, or history, and a serious inability to work independently. High-stakes tests like the college admission exam and all the exams to graduate schools demand higher-order cognitive skills, most of which students have not been taught. They are rarely asked to problem solve, to develop skills in the higher orders of taxonomy--application, evaluation, judgment, etc. I teach most of the graduate testing preparation programs for medical school, law school, business, etc. Besides the difficulty of mastering these skills to endure long tests, there is the psychological distress created by these tests. We now have to teach stress management techniques to students in hopes they will be able to cope with the tests, the high financial costs of the tests, not to mention the high personal costs. Major universities struggle with low retention of students and graduation rates hovering about 37%. Students are not ready for the academic rigors of higher education and have been seduced by 12 years of academic inadequacy brought about by the over-emphasis upon tests instead of knowledge.

Having graduate from high school decades ago, I can attest to the fact that we had few standardized tests and much stronger academic rigor in our coursework. As I often discuss with my Asian students, the old American education system also demanded long hours of homework every night, intense study, extra preparation that is commonly thought of as applicable to Asian students. The decline of educational rigor and preparation has negatively impacted American business and every other field of endeavor. Teachers are quite capable of teaching to high standards, creating tests that can measure knowledge gained, and working with the highly capable and those needing help. We used to do that all the time, but now education is in the hands of politicians, administrators, and often university educators who have not been inside an American classroom in more than 20-30 years. We need a new pedagogy and commitment to raise student achievement to the necessary levels rather than teaching to the "lowest common denominator" with total reliance upon standardized tests that are not designed to test individual achievement based upon classroom content and teacher-directed lesson plans.

Aysha Bey

University of Alabama at Birmingham

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_skills_must_21st_century_teachers_have_to_promote_high_quality_learning?cp=re65_x_p3&ch=reg&loginT=FaZIFLKcjgjInF7vSMLZnnBRUFRdbWlZIpTI4P_c8aQ%2C&pli=1#view=51cc96a0d3df3e4a607052e9