Testing, History of Educational

Early Intelligence Tests

Nineteenth-century teachers had evaluated student learning through recitation. This was a classroom practice in which the students took turns orally recapitulating key pieces of information about a subject that they had studied. The teacher determined whether the students had demonstrated sufficient learning. A group of disgruntled educators began to criticize recitation for being too subjective. They urged teachers to employ the new approach to assessment with which psychologists were experimenting.

Many scientifically minded educators were extremely impressed by Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a French psychologist who had created a distinctive intelligence exam. The 1908 version of Binet's test relied on a limited number of simple tasks. For example, Binet thought that people had the intelligence of three-year-old children if they could restate numbers; describe pictures; identify their personal family names; repeat sentences of six syllables; and point to their noses, eyes, and mouths. Binet devised more demanding tasks to determine whether examinees demonstrated advanced degrees of intelligence. Because of its straightforwardness, ease of administration, and consistent results, Binet's intelligence test became the template for instruments with which teachers could measure the academic accomplishments of their students.

Early Academic Tests

During the first half of the twentieth century, Edward Thorndike (1874–1949) was the most famous spokesperson for academic assessment and the assessment-centered approach to teaching. The distinctive tests that he and his colleagues developed closely resembled the classroom practices that they purported to measure. This correspondence bolstered the confidence of those teachers and parents who were skeptical about the novel instruments.

The tests that Thorndike championed were attractive for several additional reasons. For example, some of them could be administered to groups of students and scored with special effort-reducing devices. Another advantage was that many of the tests relied on statistical techniques that standardized the performances of students. School administrators who employed standardized tests could compare the learning demonstrated by two students, even if those students had used different textbooks or studied with different instructors. Although many educators thought that scientifically based tests would produce accurate estimates of learning, some of them also hoped that reliance on them would elevate the teaching profession to a more prestigious position in American society.

...