High Stakes Testing Essay

High-stakes tests have increasingly become a significant focus in the educational systems of the world. They are primarily designed to give a collective measure of how well a student performs in each subject area. With an enormous number of students graduating each year, high-stakes tests give educators a mutual model for assessing these students. In this current age of educational reform there has been a drastic increase in the narrowing of curriculum so that students are exposed to only the curriculum that is aligned with standards in which students will be assessed on these high-stakes tests. High-stakes testing that measures the standards being taught are a primary way of holding teachers and students accountable for attaining a high level of achievement in their courses. The results from these high-stakes tests are often used as a source of information so that education

According to Slomp (2008), the teachers in their study valued the high-stakes test to some point, however the more critical of the exam’s construct flaws a teacher was, the more explicitly that teacher focused on teaching to the exam. Hume and Coll (2009) found a similar trend amongst the teachers in their study where many of the teachers are operating in the terms of teaching to the test rather than to the spirit of the curriculum. Research performed by Au (2007) as well as Polesel, Rice, and Dulfer (2014) yielded similar results in which teachers have shown a dramatic increase in teacher-centered and fact driven instruction which research has found to diminish learning. Au (2007) even found that the dominant trend examined when it comes to high-stakes testing in specific content areas is that the curriculum tends to narrow and become fragmented into "bits and pieces learned for the sake of the tests themselves" (p.