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Critical Review of Cizek, Gregory J. (2005). High-Stakes Testing: Contexts, Characteristics, Critiques, and Consequences In Richard Phelps (Ed.), Defending Standardized Testing (pp. 23-54). New York, New York: Psychological Press.

By Cheryl LeBlanc-Weldon

When I decided to delve into the issue of high-stakes testing, I purposefully set out to find its defenders. Critical thinking is important to me and part of the process of thinking critically is to view a variety of perspectives on an issue in order to obtain an informed understanding and from that, an opinion.
As an experienced educator, I have participated in standardized testing in a variety of ways. I have administered and graded tests in both Mathematics and Language Arts. I believe that currently in Nova Scotia we don’t have the type of high-stakes testing they have in the USA and other parts of the world. Our students do not need to achieve a certain level of achievement on the standardized tests they take in order to grade and teachers are not fired or have their salaries docked when students fail to achieve the benchmarks. Still, the provincial tests our students write do have a degree of importance in that the results are published for media and public consumption (which directly affects the opinion people form of the health of our education system) and certain resources are channeled into schools with the weakest performance. In addition, the way students view themselves and their abilities are affected by their participation in writing these assessments.
So, it was with interest that I began Gregory Cizek’s article in an attempt to understand the position of high-stakes testing’s defenders. Dr. Cizek is a professor of Educational Measurement and Evaluation at the University of North Carolina. He teaches courses in applied psychometrics, statistics, program evaluation and research

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