Test Policy and Test Performance: Education, Language, and Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Tests as Tools of Educational Policy: Theory, Attribution, and Belief

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Mandated Tests: Educational Reform or Quality Indicator?

      • Eva L. Baker

      Pages 3-23

   3. Student Achievement Tests as Tools of Educational Policy: Practices and Consequences

      • Edward Haertel

      Pages 25-50

   4. Making Sense of School Testing

      • Walter M. Haney

      Pages 51-62

   5. The Irish Study Revisited

      • George F. Madaus

      Pages 63-89

3. Tests in Educational Decision Making: Psychometric and Political Boundary Conditions

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 91-91

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   2. Using Test Scores for Decision Making

      • William A. Mehrens

      Pages 93-113

   3. If Not Tests, Then What?

      • Christopher Jencks

      Pages 115-121

   4. Advice to the Commission

      • George Hanford

      Pages 123-126

4. Language, Culture, Ethnicity, and Testing

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. Aspects of Differential Performance by Minorities on Standardized Tests: Linguistic and Sociocultural Factors

      • Mary Catherine O’Connor

      Pages 129-181

   3. Ethnic Group Differences in the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) Performance of American Youth: Implications for Career Prospects

      • Elsie G. J. Moore

      Pages 183-206

   4. Testing Bilingual Proficiency for Specialized Occupations: Issues and Implications

      • Guadalupe Valdés

      Pages 207-229

   5. Informal Assessment of Asian Americans: A Cultural and Linguistic Mismatch?

      • Chui Lim Tsang

      Pages 231-257

   6. Black and White Cultural Styles in Pluralistic Perspective

      • Thomas Kochman

      Pages 259-296

5. Back Matter

   Pages 297-306

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Bernard R. Gifford In the United States, the standardized test has become one of the major sources of information for reducing uncertainty in the determination of individual merit and in the allocation of merit-based educational, training, and employment opportunities. Most major institutions of higher education require applicants to supplement their records of academic achievements with scores on standardized tests. Similarly, in the workplace, as a condition of employment or assignment to training programs, more and more employers are requiring prospective employees to sit for standardized tests. In short, with increasing frequency and intensity, individual members of the political economy are required to transmit to the opportunity marketplace scores on standardized examinations that purport to be objective measures of their abilities, talents, and potential. In many instances, these test scores are the only signals about their skills that job applicants are permitted to send to prospective employers. THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TESTING AND PUBLIC POLICY In view of the importance of these issues to our current national agenda, it was proposed that the Human Rights and Governance and the Education and Culture Programs of the Ford Foundation support the establishment of a ''blue ribbon" National Commission on Testing and Public Policy to investigate some of the major problems, as well as the untapped opportunities, created by recent trends in the use of standardized tests, particularly in the workplace and in schools.

• Training
• higher education
• political economy
• service

• Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, USA

  Bernard R. Gifford

Policies and ethics