History of Testing in the United States: Higher Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 683 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Nettles
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Student Assessment ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Higher Education Policies

Since the founding of Harvard College, colleges and universities have used many types of examinations to serve multiple purposes. In the early days of student assessment, the process was straightforward. Each institution developed and administered its own unique examination to its own students to monitor their progress and to prospective students who applied for admission. Large-scale standardized tests emerged in the twentieth century in part to relieve the burden placed upon high schools of having to prepare students to meet the examination requirements of each institution to which a student applied. Up to that point, local communities of tutors and teachers were attempting to prepare students to succeed on each higher education institution’s unique examination. Large-scale standardized tests have enjoyed more than a century of popularity and growth, and they have helped higher education institutions to solve problems in admissions and placement, and to measure learning outcomes. Over time, they have also become controversial, especially pertaining to race and class. This article is a historical view of educational testing in U.S. higher education, linking its development with past and present societal challenges related to civil rights laws, prominent higher education policies, and the long struggle of African American people in the United States.

New Directions in Latino/a/x Histories of Education: Comparative Studies in Race, Language, Law, and Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-622
Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Legal Cases

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in scholarship on Latino educational history and a new nonbinary umbrella term, Latinx, that a younger generation prefers. Many of historian Victoria-María MacDonald's astute observations in 2001 presaged the growth of the field. Focus has increased on Spanish-surnamed teachers and discussions have grown about the Latino experience in higher education, especially around student activism on campus. Great strides are being made in studying the history of Spanish-speaking regions with long ties to the United States, either as colonies or as sites of large-scale immigration, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Historical inquiry into the place of Latinos in the US educational system has also developed in ways that MacDonald did not anticipate. The growth of the comparative race and ethnicity field in and of itself has encouraged cross-ethnic and cross-racial studies, which often also tie together larger themes of colonialism, language instruction, legal cases, and civil rights or activism.

Assessment for Monitoring of Education Systems: The U.S. Example

2019 ◽  
Vol 683 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-74
Author(s):  
Erin M. Fahle ◽  
Benjamin R. Shear ◽  
Kenneth A. Shores
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
System Monitoring ◽  
National Assessment ◽  
Education Data ◽  
Monitoring Tools ◽  
Monitoring Test ◽  
Race Ethnicity

Standardized tests are regularly used as education system monitoring tools to compare the average performance of students living in different states or belonging to different subgroups (e.g., defined by race/ethnicity, sex, or parental income) and to track their progress over time. This article describes some uses and design features of tests in system monitoring contexts. We provide the example of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only large-scale system monitoring test in the United States. The availability of NAEP data, in turn, has facilitated the construction of the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), a publicly available database that can be used to describe patterns of achievement for nearly all school districts in the United States. Here, we discuss progress in and challenges to the use of standardized tests as system monitoring tools.

High-Stakes Testing, Standardization, and Inequality in the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Au
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
Students Of Color ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Racial Achievement

High-stakes standardized tests standardize which knowledge is assessed, and because consequences are tied to their results, they have the impact of standardizing classroom content, teaching, and learning. The result is that students whose cultural identities do not fit the standardized norms created by test-based must either adapt or are left out of the curriculum and the classroom. This happens in a few key ways. First, as schools face increased pressure to raise test scores, curriculum content that embraces the diversity of student history, culture, and experience gets pushed out. In turn, this standardization of content limits the diversity of teacher and student identities expressed in classroom pedagogical experiences. Finally, given the disparate racial achievement on high-stakes tests, students of color face more intense pressure to perform, while at the same time their educational experiences become increasingly restricted and less rich than those of affluent, whiter students. Additionally, even though educational research has consistently shown that high-stakes testing correlates most strongly with the socioeconomic backgrounds of students and their communities, policymakers and many educators presume that these tests are offer objective measurements of individual merit. This mistaken belief ulitmately serves to hide and justify existing inequalities in the United States under the notion of individual achievement. The overall result being that high-stakes, standardized tests reproduce educational inequalities associated with race and class in the United States.

The Character and Function of a Pioneer Elite: Rural California 1848–1880

1981 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-389
Author(s):  
R. A. Burchell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Control ◽  
American People ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

The history of the United States has been described again and again as the history of change, motion and instability. From Tocqueville to Turner, from Bancroft to Billington, from Berthoff to Thernstrom, the accent has been laid on the dynamic — whether it be democratisation, westward expansion, immigration, internal migration or “Americanisation.” It would appear almost incontrovertible that by 1900 the American people were unsettled, in search of order, pressured by the “M Factor,” responding unhappily to industrialism. Yet a number of questions may be asked: where, leaving aside the American Civil War as a very special case, is the evidence of large-scale dissatisfaction with and rebellion against the status quo; where is the evidence that, as the nation expanded west and its institutions extended over ever wider territories, they weakened and fell into disrepute; why did the United States succeed in reaching the Pacific in one piece rather than as several republics, as some of the Founding Fathers feared? One answer might be that the American people formed a consensus after all, but that is not the argument here. It is not necessary to involve the whole American people in an explanation of continuities, for the purpose here is to show how conservative, stabilising cultural control was in one case successfully provided by the few and not the many.

Reflections on America’s Higher Education: My Hmong Voice

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong T. Xiong
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
American Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hmong People

AbstractHmong people in the United States of America have started to emerge on the national scene thanks to the recent rise of Hmong politicians winning State representative, senate, and assembly seats. The Hmong-American experience in the United States is a rollercoaster experience. While we have made America our home for the past 45 years, our presence is still largely unknown to the majority of the American people. The struggle of every Hmong person living in a relatively unknown land, unknown culture, and unknown people is very real, it represents that of the whole community struggles to survive. This article focuses on my graduate school experience through the so called multicultural education system. I provide a brief history of the Hmong people, why we are here in the United States, Hmong people’s overall educational experience, and my personal experience in maneuvering through the bureaucratic institution of graduate school. My story represents the larger story of the Hmong people experience in the United States. Portions of this story have appeared as a chapter in the book, Voices of Asian American in higher education: The unheard stories (Obiakor & Hui-Michael, 2018).

scholarly journals Envisioning Innovation at the Intersection of Sport and Disability: A Blueprint for American Higher Education

2017 ◽  
pp. 92-109
Author(s):  
Derek Van Rheenen ◽  
Matt Grigorieff ◽  
Jessica N. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Students With Disabilities ◽  
Visual Impairments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
United States Department ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

In January 2013, the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued policy guidelines to ensure that students with disabilities have equal opportunities to participate in extracurricular athletic activities in public elementary, secondary and postsecondary schools.   To date, few educational institutions, particularly within higher education, have met this national need. This paper describes a pilot course offered at  a large public university on the west coast of the United States that combines learning about disability studies while participating in goalball, a sport designed for individuals with visual impairments. The implementation of this pilot program highlights the challenges and opportunities for educational institutions to offer students with disabilities, particularly students with visual impairments, equal opportunities to participate in athletics.  The paper envisions innovation at the intersection of sport and disability and offers a possible blueprint for other colleges and universities that seek to create similar extra or co-curricular opportunities in line with the OCR’s policy guidelines.   

Quality Control of Data in a Large-Scale Cancer Register Program

1966 ◽  
Vol 05 (02) ◽  
pp. 67-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. I. Lourie ◽  
W. Haenszeland
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Quality Control ◽  
Cancer Patients ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Newly Diagnosed ◽  
Related Data ◽  
Cancer Register ◽  
Independent Review ◽  
End Results

Quality control of data collected in the United States by the Cancer End Results Program utilizing punchcards prepared by participating registries in accordance with a Uniform Punchcard Code is discussed. Existing arrangements decentralize responsibility for editing and related data processing to the local registries with centralization of tabulating and statistical services in the End Results Section, National Cancer Institute. The most recent deck of punchcards represented over 600,000 cancer patients; approximately 50,000 newly diagnosed cases are added annually.Mechanical editing and inspection of punchcards and field audits are the principal tools for quality control. Mechanical editing of the punchcards includes testing for blank entries and detection of in-admissable or inconsistent codes. Highly improbable codes are subjected to special scrutiny. Field audits include the drawing of a 1-10 percent random sample of punchcards submitted by a registry; the charts are .then reabstracted and recoded by a NCI staff member and differences between the punchcard and the results of independent review are noted.

Emigrant Psychoanalysts in the USA and the FBI Archives

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Goggin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Nation

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.

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