Objectives:

1. The action should promote the learning and long-term retention of important knowledge and content skills that students are expected to learn, as defined by the district’s standards/curriculum.

2. The action should provide students with knowledge and skills that have applicability to a broad range of situations/contexts—not just completion of a set of multiple-choice questions.

3. The amount of instructional time dedicated to test preparation should be warranted in light of the types of educational opportunities being replaced/lost.

4. The actions should be matched with the needs of individual students.

Negative consequences associated with lost educational value include the following:

• Student learning is short-term or is lacking in importance.

• Students are not learning all important educational outcomes due to the reallocation of instructional emphasis.

• Students are not being given the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills to a broad range of situations.

All of these consequences are worse (for students) than if the school makes “the list.”

Let’s turn to a scenario illustrating the use of multiple-choice questions on classroom assessments and consider in what ways this practice is related to educational opportunities gained and lost.

It appears as if Mr. Newton has decided to integrate test preparation into his regular instruction instead of right before the ITBS is administered. Is this appropriate? According to the guidance from Iowa Testing Programs (August, 2005):

So, integrating the practice into regular instruction is a good thing. But what about the fact that Mr. Newton has structured most of his classroom tests to be similar to the ITBS in terms of item format and language used? What, if anything, has been gained or lost? Do the benefits outweigh the loss?

The emphasis that Mr. Newton has placed on scientific inquiry—a skill directly covered by the ITBS—is not problematic because it is a valuable learning outcome as defined by his school’s curriculum and because he did not use questions from the ITBS as a model of what he should include on his regular tests.

In addition, helping students with the format of the test helps ensure that errors are a result of lack of achievement and not because of a lack of understanding based on how the question was worded. However, if he makes most of his tests resemble the ITBS (i.e., nearly all multiple choice questions), he will miss out on other aspects of science achievement, such as use of lab equipment and the written summaries of lab results, which are not easily measured by multiple-choice questions.

As a final scenario, let’s look once again at an example of how teaching of test-taking skills might be implemented.

The staff at South Central Junior High are using practices designed to review test-taking skills rather than content that will be on the test; it is encouraging that the efforts are designed to help students do their best on the tests so as to get the most accurate scores possible. However, two full class periods on these skills might be a bit much and probably takes away from other important learning objectives. Additionally, doing the practice right before the test might place undue pressure on some students. This pressure could result in them not being able to do their best, and may result in only short-term learning of these important skills. A few students might benefit from such intense work, but most likely won’t. Thus, the activity helps a few and wastes the time of many.

But, what about the fact that all students are being taught this test-taking skills curriculum? Is it important to make sure that all students are treated the same way? Once again, turning to the guidance provided by Iowa Testing Program (August, 2005):