Measure for measures: What do standardized tests really tell us about students and schools?
HGSE Professor Daniel Koretz

Video Clip (Part 4)

Daniel Koretz: Well, I have two concerns. We do know how to write tests that are useful down to fairly young ages. But there are a couple of things to be worried about, three. One is that what kids learn very early on is different. If you really want to measure whether kids have gained in mathematics proficiency from fourth to fifth grade, that’s something we know how to do. People have been doing that for half a century or more. The content that kids are learning in school is clear.

But let’s say you’re looking at reading, and you really want to measure performance in kindergarten. Well, letter knowledge is not like reading comprehension. Some of the things that kids are learning at very young ages are fundamentally different. And we don’t really know all that well what the developmental path is from those things to later. So there’s a real risk in having tests of, say, emergent literacy skills and misinterpreting them as being somehow equivalent to the reading tests we might give a couple of years later. That’s, I think, a real issue.

A second is that when you get down to young enough ages, kids’ performance is very unstable. And that just means the reliability of the estimates you get from tests goes down as kids get younger (that’s odd way to put it) when you use-- test younger kids.

The third thing that concerns me is, I’m even more concerned about what tests don’t measure when we talk about little kids. So if you’re talking about kids who are in eleventh grade, let’s say, in a college-bound track-- I'll put this as a concrete example: when my kids were in secondary school, one of my concerns is that they learn that math is useful and can actually be fun. Because most American students learn neither of those things. And if the cost of that was slightly lower performance on a test, I would have jumped at the chance. I don't think many of-- not all of their teachers agreed with that.

But if the answer was, there was a little bit too much of an emphasis in eleventh grade on pre-calc, okay, it’s not the end of the world. But it can be really serious if you’re talking about four year-olds. At that point, I would be, as a parent and as an educator and as a researcher much more concerned about motivations, attitudes, things that are quite distinct from, say, letter knowledge. And I’m very worried about the-- what you could call the academization of early education.

Now with a caveat — we do know that one of the things we can do to help students from certain disadvantaged backgrounds is to give them preschool programs that are very cognitively-oriented, very linguistically-oriented, to try to give them some of the exposure, for example, to complex language that the children of MIT professors down the street get automatically at the dinner table. I think that’s a laudable effort. I think that we should do that.

But at the same time, I think we really can’t forget that young kids are learning a lot of things other than just content. And I worry that as testing gets pushed lower and lower, that educators are being encouraged to pay less attention to that, even to things that will matter just in schooling, socializing kids to do well in school environment for example.

So I think once you get below, say, third grade, we need to be really cautious. That’s not to say we shouldn’t test, but we better do it with our eyes open. We better watch what happens in classrooms, and just be careful, be more careful.

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