High-Stakes Testing

Defining High-Stakes, Standardized Testing

A standardized test is any test that is developed, delivered, and scored in a predetermined, standardized manner. There are two broad types of standardized tests used in education today: norm referenced and criterion referenced. A norm-referenced standardized test compares one student's test score to a whole group of other students, essentially comparing how one student scores relative to the average scores of everyone else who took the test (the norm). A criterion-referenced [Page 1059]standardized test measures a student's score in relation to set criteria for knowledge—it measures how much of a particular subject area a student knows.

Many standardized tests given in U.S. schools are referred to as high-stakes tests. A standardized test becomes “high stakes” when student scores are used to determine rewards and sanctions for students, teachers, principals, schools, and school districts. Standardized tests are also high stakes because many test scores are published and shared with the public, making students, teachers, principals, and schools feel the weight of public pressure regarding student test performance.

History of High-Stakes Testing in the United States

High-stakes testing in the United States originated with the intelligence quotient (IQ) testing and eugenics movements in the early 1900s. Through the work of then-prominent psychologists like Henry M. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, and Robert Yerkes, the concept of IQ became conceived of as hereditary and fixed. Leaders in the eugenics movement in the United States seized upon the findings of IQ testing to assert that certain races, ethnic groups, classes of people, and women were biologically inferior to affluent, White men. IQ testing soon found its way into educational institutions in the United States because it provided a tool for the efficient measurement and classification of children—often sorting diverse bodies of students along the lines of race, ethnicity, and economic class, and reproducing social inequalities in schools.

Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1845, administered some of the first standardized testing of children in public schools. Mann considered the tests an efficient, standardized, and easily accountable way of assessing student learning. The trend of developing tests to measure efficiency in schools continued to grow into the early 1900s, where by 1911 the National Education Association had appointed a Committee on Tests and Standards of Efficiency in Schools and School Systems, and by 1913 several handwriting and arithmetic tests had been created and were being used in some schools.

Lewis M. Terman, Stanford University Professor of Psychology, played a key role—under the sponsorship of the National Academy of Sciences—in developing the National Intelligence Tests for schoolchildren in 1919, and by 1920 more than 400,000 copies of these tests had been sold nationwide. Terman and others also created the Stanford Achievement Test in 1922, and by late 1925, he reported sales of this test to be near 1.5 million copies. A 1925 survey of 215 cities with populations of more than 10,000 found that 64% of these cities used intelligence tests to classify and sort elementary students, 56% used the tests to classify and sort junior high school students, and 41% did the same for high school students. Another survey of superintendents of school districts in cities with populations of more than 10,000 people—completed in 1926—produced similar results. Marketing Terman's own later-developed intelligence test, the Terman Group Test, the World Book Company reported annual sales of more than 775,000 tests by 1928. By 1932, 112 of 150 large city school systems in the United States had begun to use intelligence testing to place students into ability groups, and colleges had also begun to use these tests to justify admissions as well.

...