In an online discussion about educational testing, an exasperated education professional interjected that the whole discussion was moot. Had there ever been even a single study showing any benefit accruing from testing students?
I sent him a copy of my 2012 meta-analysis of several hundred studies estimating the effects on student achievement from testing, and never heard back. I have since discovered hundreds more such studies. All one had to do was look for them.
Psychology professors from the early 20thcentury on produced one of the most common study types—randomly assigning their dozens of introductory psychology students to two or more groups, one tested more or differently than the others.
Presumably, the skeptical educator had completed a degree in a graduate school of education and kept up with the literature in his field. How could he believe that such a large research literature did not exist? He could because that is what he was told, in education school and by the professional literature which steadily drummed a beat of “problems with testing.”
It is no secret that many education professors and professionals dislike testing. One way to express that dislike would be to lay out all the evidence for and against and explain why one leans against. Another, much more effective, method is to pretend that the evidence for it does not exist. If something does not exist, there is no point in looking for it. One wins the argument by default.
The American taxpayer funded the most substantial effort to bury the bulk of the research literature on educational testing. For several decades, the US Education Department bestowed millions of dollars on an exclusive consortium of groups of testing experts from several graduate schools of education and the RAND Corporation. They started their tenure around 1980, declaring ad infinitum that little to no relevant research existed on the effects of testing. Over time, their taxpayer-funded reports cited less and less previous research conducted by others and more of their own anti-testing research. Eventually, they cited their own research almost exclusively.