‘Teaching to test’ gets bad report card inUS (The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 Jun 2011, Page5)
SMH:
TEST-BASED incentive programs that offer sanctions or rewards for teachers, students and schools have failed to lift student achievement despite several decades of use in the US, says a report by the US National Research Council.
No Child Left Behind, the testing program introduced by the former president George Bush, in 2001, produced some of the larger effects among the programs studied.
But the report said the gains were ‘‘small in comparison with the improvements the nation hopes to achieve’’. It found evidence of ‘‘teaching to the test’’, finding that students’ knowledge of untested areas may stay the same or even decrease. While results in the official tests may rise, performance in ‘‘low-stakes’’ tests not linked to incentive programs showed that the overall effect on achievement tended to be small and was in effect zero for a number of incentives programs.
‘Teaching to test’ gets bad report card inUS
Andrew Stevenson EDUCATION EDITOR edu@smh.com.au
The Sydney Morning Herald
15 Jun 2011
TEST-BASED incentive programs that offer sanctions or rewards for teachers, students and schools have failed to lift student achievement despite several decades of use in the US, says a report by the US National Research Council. No Child Left Behind,…read more…
