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Pages 1-6

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From page 1...
... The Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education was established by the National Research Council to review and synthesize research about how incentives affect behavior and to consider the implications of that research for educational accountability systems that attach incentives to test results. The committee focused on research about incentives in which an explicit consequence is attached to a measure of performance, starting first with basic research from the social and behavioral sciences and then turning to applied research in education.
From page 2...
... The committee's research review also identified three issues related to evaluating the success of incentive systems: 1. Nonincentivized performance measures for evaluation: Incentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes.
From page 3...
... Given the broad outcomes that are the goals for education, the necessarily limited coverage of tests, and the ways that indicators constructed from tests focus on particular types of information, it is prudent to con sider designing an incentive system that uses multiple performance measures. Incentive systems in other sectors have evolved toward using increasing numbers of performance measures on the basis of their experi ence with the limitations of particular performance measures.
From page 4...
... We also attempted to contrast different incentive programs according to the key features identified by the basic research in economic theory (the first four features noted above) : who is targeted by the incentives, what performance measures are used, what consequences are used, and what support is provided.
From page 5...
... 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 tives and accountability. This should include exploration of the effects of key features suggested by basic research, such as who is targeted for incentives; what performance measures are used; what consequences are attached to the performance measures and how frequently they are used; what additional support and options are provided to schools, teachers, and students in their efforts to improve; and how incentives are framed and communicated.
From page 6...
... To avoid having their results determined by the score inflation that occurs in the high-stakes tests attached to the incentives, researchers should use low-stakes tests that do not mimic the high-stakes tests to evaluate how test-based incentives affect achievement. Other outcomes, such as later performance in education or work and dispositions related to education, are also important to study.


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