High stakes tests are defined as those tests that “carry serious consequences for students or educators.” The consequences from standardized achievement tests range from grade retention for school children to rewards or punitive measures for schools and school districts. The nature of standardized achievement tests used in these situations poses validity problems for the decisions. Numerous uni...

How do proficiency-based accountability systems affect inequality in academic achievement? This paper reconciles mixed findings in the literature by demonstrating that three factors jointly determine accountability's impact. First, by analyzing student-level data from a large urban school district, we find that when educators face accountability pressure, they focus attention on students closes...

Which is more equitable, teacher-assigned grades or high-stakes tests? Nationwide, there is a growing trend toward the adoption of standardized tests as a means to determine promotion and graduation. “High-stakes testing” raises several concerns regarding the equity of such policies. In this article, the authors examine the question of whether high-stakes tests will mitigate or exacerbate inequ...

While the use of high-stakes testing in education is increasingly common, it is also controversial as opponents argue that these tests lead to distortion of teacher activity towards the test and away from activities that are not incentivized. An alternate use of tests that is suggested as a way of improving student learning outcomes is to use lowstakes tests to provide teachers with detailed di...

Existing evidence suggests that high stakes exams result in little increased learning among students (Amrein & Berliner, 2002; Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, & Stetcher, 2000; Koretz, Mitchell, & Stetcher, 1996). Yet, given the federal mandates for greater accountability, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and Race to the Top policies, and the “pervasive testing culture” (Moses & Nann...

Prosody can be used to infer whether or not candidates fully understand a passage they are reading aloud. In this paper, we focused on automatic assessment of prosody in a read-aloud section for a high-stakes English test. A new method was proposed to handle fundamental frequency (F0) of unvoiced segments that significantly improved the predictive power of F0. The kmeans clustering method was u...

We describe Wayang Outpost, a web-based ITS for the Math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Wayang Outpost has several distinctive features: a large breadth of problems with multimedia animations and sound in the help, problems embedded in narrative and fantasy contexts, alternative teaching strategies for students of different mental rotation abilities and memory retrieval speed. W...