A standards-based test is one that assesses students’ mastery of a set of content standards (that is, knowledge and skills) approved by a state or school district. However, most of today’s standards-based tests neither satisfactorily assess those content standards or provide educators with instructionally useful test-based reports.
A castigation of today’s so-called “standards-based tests” is the thrust of this analysis—based chiefly on the contention that these tests (1) fail to assess the content standards they purport to assess and (2) neither describe what they actually assess nor report students’ results in an instructionally supportive manner.
Having disparaged most of today’s standards-based assessments, this essay offers four rules for such tests that, if followed, would render standards-based tests instructionally enhancing.
