How Standardized Tests Warp the Learning Process

Are standardized tests bad? And if so, how?

This video looks at one particularly nefarious effect of standardized testing: tests — especially large, content-heavy tests — can incentivize students to choose less effective study methods. The upshot is that students opt to learn the material in a shallow way, even if they care about learning the subject deeply (and know how to learn it more deeply).

00:00 Introduction
00:28 Six study strategies
00:51 Student strategies to study for a test
01:18 Student strategies to learn something deeply
01:35 What the study shows
02:23 How schools respond to high stakes tests
03:02 Relationship to performance and mastery goals
03:48 Limitations to the study
05:05 That other video I made

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References:

The study I talked about is here:

Yerdelen-Damar, S., & Elby, A. (2016). Sophisticated epistemologies of physics versus high-stakes tests: How do elite high school students respond to competing influences about how to learn physics?. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(1), 010118. (currently available at https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/Phys...)

For a compelling account of fraud in the face of high-stakes testing, see:

Aviv, R. (2014). Wrong answer. The New Yorker, 21, 54-65. (currently available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...)

On how performance and mastery goals can impact learning outcomes, see:

Mouratidis, A., Michou, A., Demircioğlu, A. N., & Sayil, M. (2018). Different goals, different pathways to success: Performance-approach goals as direct and mastery-approach goals as indirect predictors of grades in mathematics. Learning and Individual Differences, 61, 127-135. (currently available at http://repository.bilkent.edu.tr/bits.... A balanced exploration of how mastery goals and performance goals can both “work,” although in slightly different ways.

Midgley, C., Kaplan, A., & Middleton, M. (2001). Performance-approach goals: Good for what, for whom, under what circumstances, and at what cost?. Journal of educational psychology, 93(1), 77. This looks to be a pretty good summary of the literature, at least from 20 years ago. Sadly, I can’t access it.

Senko, C., & Miles, K. M. (2008). Pursuing their own learning agenda: How mastery-oriented students jeopardize their class performance. Contemporary educational psychology, 33(4), 561-583.
(currently available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/.... They argue that mastery goals can backfire sometimes, because students study the things they find interesting and ignore the things they find boring.

Big thanks to these folks on Pixabay for providing images:

Turkey: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Transparent atom: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Graduation cap: Image by mmi9 from Pixabay