Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education (2011) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
5 Recommendations for Policy and Research
5 Recommendations for Policy and Research
Pages 91-98
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From page 91... ...
They have included broadly implemented government policies -- notably, state high school exit exams and the school-level requirements of NCLB and its predecessors -- as well as experimental programs. A number of these programs have been carefully studied, using research designs that allow some level of causal conclusions about their effects.
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From page 92... ...
THE DESIGN OF NEW PROGRAMS The general lack of guidance coming from existing studies of testbased incentive programs in education suggests that future policy experimentation with test-based incentives should be guided by the key contrasts that emerge from basic research about how incentives operate. Recommendation 2: Policy makers and researchers should design and evaluate new test-based incentive programs in ways that provide information about alternative approaches to incen
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From page 93... ...
The tests and indicators used for performance measures should be designed to reflect the most valued educational goals, and their rela tive weights in the incentive system should reflect the tradeoffs across educational goals that designers of the system are prepared to accept. Although any test will necessarily be incomplete, it should be designed to emphasize the most important learning goals in the subject domain and to measure students' attainment of the goals through the use of various test item formats.
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From page 94... ...
One way of incorporating multiple measures would be to use the results of large-scale tests as triggers for more focused evaluation of struggling schools and teachers, rather than as final evaluations on their own. It is possible that the weak effects of the test-based incentive programs we reviewed may be due in part to the use of performance measures based primarily on tests that encourage narrow test preparation rather than broader instruction that can produce more general learning gains that are not tied to a particular test.
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From page 95... ...
To help explain why test-based incentives sometimes produce neg ative effects on achievement, researchers should collect data on changes in educational practice by the people who are affected by the incentives. The committee offers priorities for rigorous research, presented as questions, in four areas: behavioral responses to incentives, valid ity of test score gains, incentive system outcomes, and incentive system improvements.
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From page 96... ...
Are there relative wage and employment increases among the people for whom test scores rose? • What characteristics of students, schools, and test-based incen tives predict score inflation?
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From page 97... ...
Our review of the evidence uncovered reasons to expect positive results from incentive programs and reasons to be skeptical of apparent gains. Our recommendations, accordingly, call for policy makers to sup port experimentation with rigorous evaluation and to allow midcourse correction of policies when evaluation suggests such correction is needed.
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