Today's elementary and high school students take a wide array of standardized tests that are designed to do such things as monitor a child's progress in mastering basic skills, track a school's progress in meeting state education goals, or determine whether a student is ready to graduate from high school. However, these tests are too diverse to allow the results to be compared to one another or to national or international standards, a National Research Council committee concludes in a new report requested by Congress.
Existing state and commercially produced tests differ tremendously in the types and difficulty of the questions they ask, the thought processes they require of students, the ways and times they are administered, how closely they reflect material taught in school, how they are scored, and how the results are reported. These differences reflect the long-standing tradition of local control of schools, but pose formidable barriers to accurately linking the full array of existing tests. It is not feasible to develop an equivalency scale that would allow parents, educators, and others to compare scores from unrelated tests, the report says, or to compare the results of existing tests to such national benchmarks such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
The idea of linking existing tests emerged in Congress last year as a possible alternative to President Clinton's proposal for new voluntary national tests. One goal of the Clinton plan to test fourth-graders' reading skills and eighth-graders' progress in mathematics by the year 2001 is to enable an individual student's achievement in those subjects to be compared with national and international benchmarks, and with that of students in other school districts or states. The committee did not take a position on voluntary national testing.
The committee based its conclusions on an examination of the purposes, content, and format of existing tests, and an analysis of how tests change over time and how state policies affect the uses and interpretations of results. The committee also reviewed past efforts to link different tests and assessments to each other using a variety of statistical methods. A final report, expected in early fall, will provide additional detail on issues involved in linking subsets of existing tests, special problems in linking existing tests with NAEP, and other technical and practical aspects of linking tests.
The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering. It is a private, non-profit organization that provides advice on science and technology under a congressional charter. A committee roster follows. This study was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Copies of Equivalency and Linkage of Educational Tests: Interim Report are available from the Board on Testing and Assessment, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council; tel. (202) 334-3087. Reporters may obtain a copy from the Office of News and Public Information.