Most nations now administer standardized tests--for adult job seekers and young students alike--but the Chinese remain the world's preeminent practitioners. The nation's national college entrance exam, known as the "Gaokao", lasts for nine hours across two days. The author has seen the intensity of China's work ethic firsthand as…

In this essay, the author explores the curious irony that a discipline and a profession organized around the study and teaching of language and literacy have had so little influence on the discursive constructions (policies) that govern the teaching of language and literacy. Part of the problem, as the author sees it, is simply that so little…

In this article, the author talks about the release of the most comprehensive study of SAT exams. The headline on the Web site of the College Board, the maker of the test, was, "SAT Studies Show Test's Strength in Predicting College Success." At the same time, a headline on the Web site of the group FairTest, a 23-year-old, nonprofit…

This commentary argues for a specific conception of research, what the author and others call "critical research." The author asserts that critical research can help educators to identify quality teaching in literacy classrooms even as it helps to refine (or even redefine) their notions of curricula, pedagogy, literacy, and achievement. Here, the…

At the time of their independence, the structure of higher education, curriculum content, governance, and admissions procedures were more or less identical across the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union. Since independence there have been multiple changes, but often these have been quite similar in nature. There has been a move toward…

Jeopardy!, the trivia game show, is approaching its 25th year on television. With its amazingly bright contestants, daily doubles, potpourri categories, double jeopardy rounds, tick-tock music played during final jeopardy, and tournament of champions, Jeopardy! has become a media icon in American popular culture. Unfortunately, Jeopardy! isn't…

High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high-stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse…

We are pleased that our article prompted this series of four commentaries and that we have this opportunity to respond. We address each in turn. Duckworth and Kaufman and Agars discussed, respectively, two broad issues concerning the validity of selection systems, namely, the expansion of the predictor domain to include noncognitive predictors of…

High-stakes testing is the practice of attaching important consequences to standardized test scores, and it is the engine that drives the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The rationale for high-stakes testing is that the promise of rewards and the threat of punishments will cause teachers to work more effectively, students to be more motivated,…

Comments on the article by Vasquez and Jones, in which they put forward the argument that standardized tests do not evaluate much of anything worthwhile and do not assess merit. The current authors argue that Vasquez and Jones support their argument only through highly selective citations from the literature, and they discuss Vasquez and Jones'…

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We…

Summarizing a decade of research at the University of California, this paper concludes that admissions criteria that tap student mastery of curriculum content, such as high-school grades and performance on achievement tests, are stronger predictors of success in college and are fairer to poor and minority applicants than tests of general reasoning…

Since the publication of "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" by the U.S. Department of Education in 1983, American higher education has faced the need to develop its own effective means of learning assessment to forestall the prospect of government-imposed standardized procedures. The latter potential may have moved closed…

This essay is a critical reflection on educational standardization, particularly the standardization of assessment flowing down from major international assessment projects like the OECD's Project for International Student Assessment to national and sub-national school systems. I argue that the establishment of an increasingly uniform metric to…

Many contemporary learning disabilities (LD) experts advocate a multitiered service delivery system. Included in this formulation is the obligation to deliver for each struggling student increasingly sophisticated and intensive services before special education is considered. For students who evidence failed response to intervention, an…