Baker, Joan M. (2006). Achievement Testing in U.S. Elementary and Secondary Schools. Reviewed by Arie J. van der Ploeg

Baker, Joan M. (2006). Achievement Testing in U.S. Elementary and Secondary Schools. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pp. 125         ISBN 0-8204-7631-5 Reviewed by Arie J. van der Ploeg Learning Point Associates Naperville, Illinois October 23, 2007 Joan Baker says at the very start of this small volume that The purpose of this book is to provide an opportunity for new educators—beginning teachers—and parents to view and reflect on the various aspects of school achievement testing. This is a worthy purpose. Unfortunately, it is not delivered. This book became this reviewer’s nightmare. A reviewer hopes to speak nicely about an author’s effort, expects to engage in meaningful dialog, to be challenged, enlightened, occasionally amused. I shuddered each time I picked this book up. What troubles most is the author’s expectation for what “beginning teachers” need to know about testing: apparently, not much. That said, Ms. Baker’s prose is an easy read. I experienced several jealous moments at the smoothness, the even-temperedness of her prose. However, it is also without depth, placid, repetitious, in the end soporific. I do not want beginning teachers to nod off. I want them to sit up and take notice. Assessing student performance and one’s own instructional effectiveness is central to any teacher’s classroom business. Those tasks are neither simple nor simplistic. The book is both. Having delivered myself of these unhappy judgments, I now turn to what any reviewer owes his audience, a description of the book’s plan and content, and some comments thereon. The author uses seven chapters to cover the following territory: testing’s genesis and history, formal and informal tests, ensuring validity and reliability of tests, the variety of large-scale tests and their reporting scales, the positions of national associations about testing, fairness, and test abuse and misuse. A brief eighth chapter offers a closing summary. Only two chapters exceed 14 pages: the chapter on misuse and abuse of tests takes up 28, that describing the positions of national associations requires 20 pages. What should a beginning teacher (or a parent) need to know about the history of testing? Chapter 1 contends that testing came to prominence because from the late 19th to the late 20th century American schools grew greatly in the number and diversity of students enrolled. The growth of testing is that simple, according to Joan Baker. I might want those same teachers and parents to know a bit more about the fits and starts of the growth of the industry, diversification in test content and forms, improvements in the technologies of constructing and scoring and delivering tests, the increasing complexity and subtlety of the cognitive models that lie behind test design. The introductory chapter cites eight references, none published after 1997, in a book published in 2006. This presages the chapters that follow. By my count, only 19 of the book’s references were published after 2000. Ten of these refer to eight newspaper or newsmagazine articles; four reference the Buros Institute’s Mental Measurement yearbooks. Seminal recent books on assessment design, such as the National Research Council volume Knowing What Students Know or the National Society for the Study of Education’s 2004 yearbook Towards Coherence between Classroom Assessment and Accountability, are unacknowledged. In this era of accountability-driven assessment, the No Child Left Behind Act is not mentioned at all. State accountability systems are rarely referenced. A beginning teacher in the U.S. today will not find work in an environment without accountability testing or without pressure to meet a test-based proficiency criterion. Chapter 2 draws a variety of distinctions and parallels between informal classroom and formal large-scale standardized tests. Both of these exist to measure what students know or can do, each supplementing the types of knowledge the other provides. No mention is made that a critical purpose of any during- or after-the-event testing is to provide evidence about the effectiveness of the instruction provided. The core tools in the design and construction of both formal and informal tests are collaboration, investigation, and research. That may be, but it seems to leave out a few things, including content frameworks, instructional approach, item specification, and all the rest. Chapter 3 is devoted to the formal test, and the process of validation. Validity and reliability together are treated in six pages, with hardly a number and no formulae. A correlation is called a comparison. The superficial beginning teacher is left with the impression that published tests will be valid and reliable; the thoughtful beginning teacher will realize these six pages explain next to nothing—it will still not be clear how validity is determined or reliability calculated. The concept of standard error of measurement is treated in one page in this chapter and does not reappear anywhere else in the volume. Yet, at this moment in time when students, teachers, and schools are being judged—despite professional consensus to the contrary--on the basis of one number from one test, it would seem important that beginning teachers be reminded of the uncertainties within test performance distributions and the difficulty in specifying the connections between curriculum content, teacher instructional practice, student learning, and tested performance. Chapter 4 is an uneven tour through a land populated by norm-referenced tests, criterion-referenced tests, and informal assessments and their reporting. The first two receive a paragraph each, the latter the bulk of the chapter. However, this latter section drifts back and forth between the types. The various assessment reporting metrics (standard scores, percentile ranks, stanines, grade-equivalents) appear in this informal assessment section, even though teacher-made tests are rarely reported in those terms. Chapter 5 offers an overview of positions taken by national organizations and professional groups on matters of achievement testing. Documents credited to the following groups are mentioned: Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, International Reading Association, National Assessment of Educational Progress, National Center for Improving Science Education, National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, National Council of Social Studies, National Council of Teachers of English, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, National Science Foundation; these are supplemented by references to a few items in the popular press and several scholarly articles. Only one of these organizations actually makes tests. The standards generally subscribed to by the assessment industry, such as the “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” developed and maintained collaboratively by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education, receive no mention in this discussion. Also not mentioned are the research and technical assistance efforts over the past decade sponsored and conducted by such agencies as the Assessment and Accountability Comprehensive Center, the Center for Research on Standards and Educational Testing, the National Center on the Improvement of Educational Assessment, or the Council of Chief State School Officers’ 15 active collaborative workgroups that bring together industry and state education agency technical experts. Rather than the dated hodgepodge of inclusions and exclusions Ms. Baker provides, the beginning teacher would be better served with a shorter history of the development of the current synthesis about best practice in assessment, supported with an annotated list or timeline of agencies and activities. Chapter 6 shifts the focus to fair assessment. It begins with the point that teaching and learning are interactive. Ms. Baker interprets this to mean that “assessment is an integral part of learning,” that student responses during assessment constitute a route to fuller understanding of meaning given and meaning taken. This can be the case in ongoing classroom informal assessment. It is more difficult to assure in formal assessments. This leads her to assert the first of 10 core elements of fair testing. These points are: clarity, currency, objectivity, validation, relevance, unbiased, appropriateness of content, variety of item types, age- and grade-appropriateness, and limitations of assessment. The author discusses each characteristic in turn, but provides little justification why these 10 are the 10 keys; some of the characteristics shade into others and boundaries are less clear than one might wish. Once again, the beginning teacher walks away with a sense of some important topics but is given no means to thread them together—leaving him/her to wonder, why all the fuss? Chapter 7 marches on, to test misuse and abuse. It begins by offering a short list of abuses and misuses, spends two pages on not using standardized test results as the sole source of guidance, and then enters a 10-page discussion of within-school and outside-of-school influences on learning. Unfortunately, little of this says anything of consequence about test misuse or test abuse. The concluding chapter adds little new material, and more repetition. This review opened with the author’s opening; I end with the author’s closing sentence: . . . it is critical that test designers and test consumers view any test with skepticism, that multiple types of assessments be used, and that all stakeholders remember that no assessment—formal or informal—is powerful enough to make up for the lack of educational opportunity. True enough, I suppose. Still, most tests in use today are not meant to teach. Instruction and assessment, despite the fact we wish them joined, remain independent. This little book reminds us of that but also leaves the beginning teacher, the parent, or any other assessment novice with a sense that things are mostly all right in the assessment world. It does this because it reduces complex issues worthy of serious thought, debate, even heated argument to placid platitudes. Assessment is the heart of the process of making instruction effective. It should engage intellect and emotion. This book manages neither. A beginning teacher or parent looking for a brief introduction to the world of testing would do well to find a copy of Gregory Cizek’s Filling in the Blanks: Putting Standardized Tests to the Test. Published in 1998 by the Thomas Fordham Foundation, it is about half the length of the Baker volume reviewed here but more thorough on the issues that matter. It uses somewhat larger words, but all in all is readable and highly informative. Even though it too predates NCLB, it does provide a solid background for meaningful discussion about testing and assessment in a context of pervasive accountability. References American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington DC: American Educational Research Association. Cizek, G. J. (1998). Filling in the blanks: Putting standardized tests to the test. Washington, D C: Thomas Fordham Foundation. Pellegrino, J. W., Chudowsky, N., & Glaser, R. (Eds.). (2001). Knowing what students know: The science and design of educational assessment. Washington, D C: National Academy Press. Wilson, M. (Ed.). (2004). Towards coherence between classroom assessment and accountability (Part 2 of the 103rd yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. About the reviewer Arie J. van der Ploeg Senior Researcher Learning Point Associates Naperville, Illinois