Do High-Stakes Tests Improve Learning?

摘要

Looking across all of the combinations of incentives, the committee found that when evaluated using low-stakes tests, incentives' overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number of programs. Even when evaluated using the high-stakes tests attached to the incentives, a number of programs show only small effects. The largest effects resulted from incentives applied to schools, such as those used in NCLB. Even here, however, the effect size of 0.08 is the equivalent of moving a student performing at the 50th percentile to the 53rd percentile.