Educational Leadership

Research Says…
Jane L. David
High-Stakes Testing Narrows the Curriculum

Are science, social studies, the arts, and physical education really disappearing from elementary schools? Are critical thinking and deep reading of literature fading from the high school curriculum?

What’s the Idea?

The current rationale for standards-based
reform goes like this: If standards are
demanding and tests accurately measure
achievement of those standards,
then curriculum and instruction
will become richer and more rig-
orous. By attaching serious con-
sequences to schools that fail to
increase test scores, U.S. policy-
makers believe that educators will
be motivated to pay attention to
what is on the tests.

What’s the Reality?
Educators do pay attention to
what is on the tests—but the
consequences are not necessarily
the intended ones. Even the most carefully
designed standards are only as effective as
the tests that assess how well students have
achieved them. And standardized tests can
only assess a small portion of the curriculum.
State accountability tests leave out some sub-
jects altogether, and they only cover a limited
sample of the many subtopics covered in
others. In addition, for practical reasons, state
tests tend to rely on easy-to-score questions
that measure basic skills and recall instead
of higher-order thinking. Worse yet, when
stakes are high, it’s more likely that what’s
missing from the tests will disappear from the
curriculum, especially in schools with low-
performing students.

The need to make test performance the first priority has forced many teachers to push topics and activities that do not appear on the test to the end of the school year, after testing is finished. Others try to compensate for lost

curriculum areas by integrating subject matter from science and social studies into language arts and math, the most tested domains.

What’s the Research?

Research in the last few decades documents that state testing can significantly affect curriculum and instruction.

In the 1990s—when a number of states introduced performance-based assessments that included open-ended questions, written explanations of problem solving, and even experiments—researchers found clear evidence that these assessments influenced instruction. Teachers began to include more writing and extended math problems in classroom

When stakes are high, it’s
likely that what’s missing
from the tests will disappear
from the curriculum.

instruction and classroom tests (Koretz, Mitchell, Barron, & Keith, 1996). In states that tested different subjects in different years, teachers adjusted their curriculum to emphasize the subjects to be tested that year (Stecher & Barron, 1999).

During that era, when stakes attached to testing were lower, the average amount of time that U.S. teachers devoted to different subjects at the national level was steady. From 1987 to 2003, time allocation across subjects in all public elementary schools in the United States stayed roughly the same: about two hours a day in language arts, one hour in math, and one-half hour each in social studies and science (Morton & Dalton, 2007; Perie, Baker, & Bobbitt, 1997).