High-Stakes Examinations that Support Student Learning - Recommendations for the design, development and implementation of the SBAC assessments

Oct 3, 2026

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High-stakes examinations must support student learning while remaining valid, reliable, and cost-effective, especially in mathematics. The paper, produced by the ISDDE Working Group on Examinations and Policy, explains analysis and recommendations for building an assessment system. It addresses how to define “better,” integrate high-stakes testing within a coherent system that links learning, teaching, and professional development, and protect assessment quality through planning, development, monitoring, and audit, using illustrative international examples.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryExam

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Recommendations

Create a pool of tasks

Establish authoritative committees

Select capable vendors

Involve teachers in scoring

Grow human capacity via training

Ongoing audit and evaluation

Who We Are

High-‐stakes Examinations that Support Student Learning: Recommendations for the design, development and implementation of the SBAC assessments Paul Black, Hugh Burkhardt, Phil Daro, Glenda Lappan, Daniel Pead, and Max Stephens for the ISDDE Working Group on Examinations and Policy How can SBAC best achieve its goal of creating better assessments in mathematics? The recommendations in this paper arise from meetings of this Working Group of ISDDE, the International Society for Design and Development in Education. The group brought together high-‐level international expertise in assessment design. It tackled issues that are central to policy makers looking for tests that, at reasonable cost, deliver valid, reliable assessments of students’performance in mathematics – with results that inform students, teachers, and school systems. This paper describes the analysis and recommendations from the group, with references that provide further detail. It is designed to contribute to the conversation on “how to do better”. What is “better”? High-‐stakes testing has enormous influence on teaching and learning in classrooms – for better or for worse. Teachers give high priority to classroom activities that focus on the types of task in the test. This is understandable, indeed inevitable – after all, their careers are directly affected by the scores of their students on these tests, the official measure of their professional success. Driven by pressures for low cost, simplicity of grading and task predictability, current tests have a narrow range of types of item that does not reflect the breadth of world-‐class learning goals, as set out in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics or, indeed, in many of the state standards that CCSS is replacing. Yet, conversely, high quality exams can help systems to educate their students better. Such tests combine valid and reliable information for accountability purposes with a beneficial influence on teaching and learning in classrooms – i.e. they are tests worth teaching to. In this respect, the Department of Education guidelines for RTT assessment gave reason to be hopeful, as did the consequent proposals from SBAC and PARCC.“Tests worth teaching to” seems to be an idea whose time has come. How do we get there? This paper, building on substantial experience worldwide, sets out the essential elements of an assessment system that meets this goal, taking into account the necessary constraints of cost. In brief, this entails planning assessment, including high-‐stakes testing, as an integral part of a coherent system covering learning, teaching and professional development, all focused on the classroom. It also entails treating assessment as a design and development challenge that entails first introducing high-‐quality formative and summative assessments, then monitoring the assessments to maintain high quality and to counteract the inevitable pressures for degrading that quality. Recommendations 1. Create a pool of tasks from a variety of sources, each of which has proven skill in research-‐based understanding of learning and performance, in creative design, and in the process of refinement through classrooms trials, with iterations of feedback from teachers and others; 2. Establish authoritative committees with the needed expertise who will select tasks from the pool to produce tests that are balanced across performance goals, as summarized in the standards; 3. Select vendors with the capability of administering tests with complex tasks, including human scoring of student responses, with appropriate monitoring to optimize reliability consistent with test validity; 4. Involve teachers in the scoring process, using the potential of scoring training as a powerful mode of professional development, linking high-‐stakes assessment to curriculum and classroom learning; 5. Grow human capacity by providing training for designers of curriculum and of assessment; 6. Redo

FAQs

What is the main purpose of these SBAC assessment recommendations?

To design, develop, and implement SBAC assessments that create better mathematics tests by producing valid, reliable results at reasonable cost and with positive classroom impact.

Why does the paper emphasize “tests worth teaching to”?

Because current high-stakes testing can narrow classroom practice to test-like tasks, while well-designed exams can provide valid information for accountability and beneficial influence on teaching and learning.

What elements does the paper propose for maintaining assessment quality over time?

It recommends planning assessments as part of a coherent system, introducing high-quality formative and summative assessments, monitoring them to maintain quality, and conducting ongoing audit to evaluate content and impact.

Oct 3, 2026

Upload by lugxt