Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
function as mechanisms serving social goals and perpetuating specific social struc-
tures. The use of tests as sorting mechanisms has a long history, and the privileging
of this usage is a key theme in modern test design.
The birth of democracies fueled ambitions for large-scale public educational
systems, and the emergence of these institutions coincided with the emergence of
psychology as a discipline (Karier, 1986). This is a coincidence of no small import
in the history of testing. Around the turn of the twentieth century, psychologically
informed testing procedures proliferated, spawning the field of psychometrics and
the preliminary use of intelligence testing to administer mass schooling in France
(Lagemann, 2000). Knowledge of IQ testing broke into public awareness during
World War I, as the US Armed Forces pioneered large-scale administrative appli-
cations of psychological testing—applications that were immediately adopted for
educational use (Sokal, 1990). Despite the lamentable misuses of IQ testing due
to its ties to eugenics (Gould, 1981), by the end of World War II the Educational
Testing Service had been founded, and our contemporary standardized educational
testing infrastructure was beginning to take shape (Lemann, 1999).
The contemporary educational scene in most industrialized countries is domi-
nated by a specific type of standardized testing infrastructure (Hursh, 2008; National
Research Council, 2001). This is an infrastructure that has been shaped by the
demands of rapidly growing public education systems with unprecedented influxes
of students being educated for unprecedented amounts of time. Today's tests were
built during radical social transformations that brought to light dire inequalities of
educational opportunity and accomplishment. And, for the most part, the recent
architects of our testing infrastructure have been adamant proponents of the fair
distribution of educational opportunities and well aware of the important social
function to be performed by the tests they designed (Lemann, 1999; Sokal, 1990).
However, our current testing infrastructure has been shaped by specific psy-
chometric techniques and psychological commitments, criticized by one authority
as “the application of twentieth century statistics to nineteenth century psychol-
ogy” (Mislevy, 1993, p. 19). Moreover, this approach to psychological testing has
always neglected the educative function of tests and emphasized their use as sorting
mechanisms for allotting future educational opportunities and conferring credentials
(Chapman, 1988). The use of tests as sorting mechanisms allows the testing infras-
tructure to serve a broad public function in overseeing social role allocation. Thus,
what now exists is an infrastructure built and run by private companies but serving
a public function (Lemann, 1999). This has led to concerns about the existence of a
standardized testing industrial complex and other sociopolitical criticism of the test-
ing industry, from inflammatory exposés (Nairn, 1980) to more carefully reasoned
calls for reform (Hursh, 2008).
In the USA this testing industry has been coupled to legislative injunctions result-
ing in the near universal use of high-stakes tests, which serve as both accountability
measures for schools and graduation requirements for students (Hess & Petrilli,
2006; NRC, 1999). This nationally mandated use of a specific form of testing in
K-12 education represents a radical departure from prior US educational policy,
which had traditionally left control of test use and design up to state and local
Search WWH ::




Custom Search