African Americans and Testing

Importance of Testing

Various kinds of decision making are involved in teaching. It is necessary for teachers to know their [Page 59]students’ performance in the classroom. Testing is one way of doing this. Testing allows a teacher to compare one student’s performance on a particular task with a set standard or the performance of other students by gathering information about student learning. Many people can design a test, including a classroom teacher; local, state, or federal government agencies such as school districts; or commercial test development firms. When done properly, testing can provide unbiased data for decision making, giving it a large role in many classroom decisions.

Testing became more common in K–12 classrooms, with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which used the results of standardized tests to measure school performance. Test results are also used to make many decisions about individual students. Achievement tests are common measures given to students and are meant to measure a student’s level of learning in specific content areas such as reading comprehension, language usage, computation, science, social studies, mathematics, and logical reasoning.

Admission to kindergarten; promotion from one grade to the next; high school honors, Advanced Placement classes and graduation; access to special programs; placement in special education classes; teacher licensure and tenure; and school funding may all be affected by test results. In making these decisions, it is of great importance to consider the quality of the test itself and the way the test is used. For example, many African Americans are inappropriately identified as needing remedial instruction, and a majority are placed in special education classes.

It is important to know the consequences of choosing one test over another for a particular purpose with a given group. Of equal significance is understanding how the test scores of minority-group students will be interpreted and the effect of testing on each of the students. In addition, we need to be cognizant of what we mean by intelligence, competence, and scholastic aptitude and what implications come with each of these. Do our views agree with those implied by the tests we use to measure these constructs? How will other information about the individual be integrated with test results to make major decisions or judgments? Responding to these questions requires choices based on values as well as accurate information about what tests can and cannot tell us.

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