Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: When were standardized tests introduced in American schools?
Standardized testing has been a part of American education since the 1800s, but the widespread reliance on standardized is largely a 20th-century phenomenon. For instance the College Entrance Examination Board did not begin standardized testing in connection to higher education until 1900. The College Entrance Examination Board was established and in 1901, the first examinations were administered around the country in nine subjects. This test was implemented with the idea of creating standardized admissions for the United States in northeastern elite universities. Originally, the test was also meant for top boarding school in order to standardize curriculum. With origins in World War I the Army Alpha and Beta tests developed by Robert Yerkes and colleagues. Before then, immigration in the mid-19th century contributed to the growth of standardized tests in the United States. Standardized tests were used in immigration when people first came over to test social roles and find social power and status.
The first English-language IQ test, the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales, was adapted from a test battery designed for school placement by Alfred Binet in France. Lewis Terman adapted Binet's test and promoted it as a test measuring "general intelligence." Terman's test was the first widely used mental test to report scores in "intelligence quotient" form ("mental age" divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100). Current tests are scored in "deviation IQ" form, with a performance level by a test-taker two standard deviations below the median score for the test-taker's age group defined as IQ 70. Until the most recent revision of diagnostic standards, an IQ of 70 or below was a primary factor for intellectual disability diagnosis, and IQ scores were used to categorize degrees of intellectual disability.
In September 2004, with the support of parents, the school became the first to introduce random drug tests which commenced in January 2005. The tests could be performed only when parents gave permission for their child to be tested. Students who refused to be available for testing or tested positive would undergo a counselling program. Critics of the program stated an infringement of privacy would lead to legal action. At the school, 20 students were tested weekly and were given a mouth swab for cannabis, cocaine and heroin. Supporters of the program including former Prime Minister Tony Blair who endorsed Walker's efforts and called for the program to be expanded. In 2005, the school reported that the scheme helped to boost examination results to 40% compared with 32% in 2004, and 28% in 2003.
AB 484, introduced on September 4, 2013 in the state Legislature, would end the use of STAR tests in math and English for the school year already under way – a year earlier than planned, and introduce the Measurement of Academic Performance and Progress (MAPP) tests, a new test aligned to the National Governors Association and College Board's Common Core Initiative. The bill ended up being overwhelmingly endorsed by the Senate and was expected to pass the assembly. It was passed on September 11, 2013 and signed by the Governor on October 02, 2013.
IQ classification varies from one publisher to another. IQ tests do not have validity for determining test-takers' rank order at higher IQ levels, and are perhaps only effective at determining whether a student is gifted rather than distinguishing among levels of giftedness. The Wechsler tests have a standard score ceiling of 160. Today, the Wechsler child and adult IQ tests are by far the most commonly used IQ tests in hospitals, schools, and private psychological practice. Older versions of the Stanford-Binet test, now obsolete, and the Cattell IQ test purport to yield IQ scores of 180 or higher, but those scores are not comparable to scores on currently normed tests. The Stanford-Binet Third Revision (Form L-M) yields consistently higher numerical scores for the same test-taker than scores obtained on current tests. This has prompted some authors on identification of gifted children to promote the Stanford-Binet form L-M, which has long been obsolete, as the only test with a sufficient ceiling to identify the exceptionally and profoundly gifted, despite the Stanford-Binet L-M never having been normed on a representative national sample. Because the instrument is outdated, current results derived from the Stanford-Binet L-M generate inflated and inaccurate scores. The IQ assessment of younger children remains debated.
Ron Smith, the principal of Laurel Elementary School, disclosed the middle school test scores of the 51 students from Laurel who entered the AIM system in 2004, showing their progress in English and mathematics between the 6th and 8th grades. Landsberg said "It's impossible to tell whether the students were academically strong at the start of sixth grade or were brought up to grade level by the rigors of a year at American Indian." Of the students from Laurel who had completed the 6th grade at the AIM system, 39 finished all three years at the AIM system.
Modern "Psychological evaluation" has been around for roughly 200 years, with roots that stem as far back as 2200 B.C. It started in China, and many psychologists throughout Europe worked to develop methods of testing into the 1900s. The first tests focused on aptitude. Eventually scientists tried to gauge mental processes in patients with brain damage, then children with special needs.
Lewis Terman, developer of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales, based his English-language Stanford–Binet IQ test on the French-language Binet–Simon test developed by Alfred Binet. Terman believed his test measured the "general intelligence" construct advocated by Charles Spearman (1904). Terman differed from Binet in reporting scores on his test in the form of intelligence quotient ("mental age" divided by chronological age) scores after the 1912 suggestion of German psychologist William Stern. Terman chose the category names for score levels on the Stanford–Binet test. When he first chose classification for score levels, he relied partly on the usage of earlier authors who wrote, before the existence of IQ tests, on topics such as individuals unable to care for themselves in independent adult life. Terman's first version of the Stanford–Binet was based on norming samples that included only white, American-born subjects, mostly from California, Nevada, and Oregon.
The first American schools in the thirteen original colonies opened in the 17th century. Boston Latin School was founded in 1635 and is both the first public school and oldest existing school in the United States. The first free taxpayer-supported public school in North America, the Mather School, was opened in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1639. Cremin (1970) stresses that colonists tried at first to educate by the traditional English methods of family, church, community, and apprenticeship, with schools later becoming the key agent in "socialization." At first, the rudiments of literacy and arithmetic were taught inside the family, assuming the parents had those skills. Literacy rates were much higher in New England because much of the population had been deeply involved in the Protestant Reformation and learned to read in order to read the Scriptures. Literacy was much lower in the South, where the Anglican Church was the established church. Single working-class people formed a large part of the population in the early years, arriving as indentured servants. The planter class did not support public education but arranged for private tutors for their children, and sent some to England at appropriate ages for further education.
Psychometricians generally regard IQ tests as having high statistical reliability. A high reliability implies that – although test-takers may have varying scores when taking the same test on differing occasions, and although they may have varying scores when taking different IQ tests at the same age – the scores generally agree with one another and across time. Like all statistical quantities, any particular estimate of IQ has an associated standard error that measures uncertainty about the estimate. For modern tests, the standard error of measurement is about three points . Clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient statistical validity for many clinical purposes. In a survey of 661 randomly sampled psychologists and educational researchers, published in 1988, Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman reported a general consensus supporting the validity of IQ testing. "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy." Almost all respondents picked out abstract reasoning, ability to solve problems and ability to acquire knowledge as the most important elements.
Since the early 20th century, raw scores on IQ tests have increased in most parts of the world. When a new version of an IQ test is normed, the standard scoring is set so performance at the population median results in a score of IQ 100. The phenomenon of rising raw score performance means if test-takers are scored by a constant standard scoring rule, IQ test scores have been rising at an average rate of around three IQ points per decade. This phenomenon was named the Flynn effect in the book "The Bell Curve" after James R. Flynn, the author who did the most to bring this phenomenon to the attention of psychologists.
In 1965 the far-reaching Elementary and Secondary Education Act ('ESEA'), passed as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty", provided funds for primary and secondary education ('Title I funding') while explicitly forbidding the establishment of a national curriculum. It emphasized equal access to education and established high standards and accountability. The bill also aimed to shorten the achievement gaps between students by providing every child with fair and equal opportunities to achieve an exceptional education.
An inquiry during the winter of 1959–60, in which 180 national organisations were consulted, revealed a slight preference for a change to all-year GMT+1, but instead the length of summer time was extended as a trial. A further inquiry during 1966–1967 led the government of Harold Wilson to introduce the British Standard Time experiment, with Britain remaining on GMT+1 throughout the year. This took place between 27 October 1968 and 31 October 1971, when there was a reversion to the previous arrangement.
In May 2009, American Indian Public Charter School had an Academic Performance Index (API) of 967. Mitchell Landsberg said that the other two AIM schools "are not far behind." The state API target is 800. The state average of public middle and high schools is 750. The state average of schools with underprivileged students is 650. Of the public schools in California, during that year four middle schools and three high schools had higher API scores than AIPCS; none of them had student bodies of mostly underprivileged students. Mitchell Landsberg of the "Los Angeles Times" stated that while critics of the school often said that the high number of Asian American students causes the test scores to be high, the African American and Hispanic students "do roughly as well -- in fact, better on some tests" so "[t]hat makes American Indian a rarity in American education, defying the axiom that poor black and Latino children will lag behind others in school." In 2008, Janet Roberts, the head of the AIM system, said that the speculation that the increased numbers of Asian students caused test scores to go higher demonstrated that the educational establishment has low expectations of low-income African American, Hispanic and Latino, and Native American children.
Alfred Binet (; July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.
Now discredited, eugenic beliefs played a small role at the hospital. Dr. Henry H. Goddard established an intelligence testing program on Ellis Island during 1913. Doctors would use metal calipers to measure the circumference of immigrants’ heads, and immigrants of “superior racial stock” were often favored when entering the United States. Additionally, many immigrants were detained at Ellis Island for mental illness and placed in the hospital's psychiatric ward. Some of the contemporary clinical classifications for mental illness are now archaic: idiot, imbecile, moron, or feeble-minded. It is likely that many of these immigrants were not actually mentally ill, but that cultural differences and a language barrier, as well as the immigrants’ anxiety about a new country, made them appear mentally ill. More objective testing methods were developed by Dr. Howard Andrew Knox to determine with increased accuracy whether an emigrant was mentally deficient. The Knox tests were effective in that they did not require specific cultural knowledge for successful performance. The Daughters of the American Revolution provided a robust occupational therapy program for immigrants detained at Ellis Island. They also worked with U. S. servicemen, merchant seamen, and members of the U.S. Coast Guard. Some were suffering from shell shock.
Landsberg said that the school system has high performance because it "attracts academically motivated students, relentlessly (and unapologetically) teaches to the test, wrings more seat time out of every school day, hires smart young teachers, demands near-perfect attendance, piles on the homework, refuses to promote struggling students to the next grade and keeps discipline so tight that there are no distractions or disruptions. Summer school is required." Landsberg added "There is no secret to any of this. Portions of the American Indian model resemble methods used by the KIPP charter schools or, for that matter, urban parochial schools."
The "Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale", sometimes shortened to the CMAS, was created in 1956. This scale was closely modeled after the "Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale". It was developed so that the TMAS could be applied to a broader range of people, specifically children. Kitano tested the validity of the CMAS by comparing students who were placed in special education classes versus those placed in regular classrooms. Kitano proposed the idea that children who were in special education classes were more likely to have higher anxiety than those in regular classrooms. Using the CMAS, Kitano found boys tested in the special education classes had higher anxiety scores than their regular classroom counterparts. Hafner tested the reliability of the CMAS with the knowledge that the TMAS had a feminine bias. Hafner found that the CMAS did not have a female bias. He only found two questions that females always scored higher on than their male counterparts. As the test stands now, the suggestion is to compare the female and male participants separately. Castaneda found significant differences across different grade levels, indicating that as students develop they are affected differentially by various stressors.
Sternberg was born on December 8, 1949, to a Jewish family, in New Jersey. Sternberg suffered from test anxiety as a child. As a result, he became an inadequate test taker. This upset him and he reasoned that a test was not an adequate measurement of his true knowledge and academic abilities. When he later retook a test in a room that consisted of younger students, he felt more comfortable and his scores increased dramatically. The following year, he created the Sternberg Test of Mental Ability (STOMA), his first intelligence test. This problem of test taking is what sparked Sternberg's interest in psychology.
However, over the last quarter of the 20th century the school itself began to decline. The building began showing signs of aging, at the same time as financial shortfalls led to maintenance being deferred. Within it, educational achievement began to decline as disciplinary problems rose. By the end of the century it was on the state's Persistently Dangerous Schools list. Pressure from parents in Arbor Hill led to the establishment of private charter schools in the area, and enrollment at Philip Livingston began to fall as that option became available to parents.
In order to compile his information, Abbe required a time-keeping system that was consistent among the stations. To accomplish this he divided the United States into four standard time zones. He published, in 1879, a paper titled "Report on Standard Time". In 1883, he convinced North American railroad companies to adopt his time-zone system. In 1884, Britain, which had already adopted its own standard time system for England, Scotland, and Wales, helped gather international consent for global time. In time, the American government, influenced in part by his 1879 paper, adopted the time-zone system.
In the drive to spread vocational and technical education, regular secondary-school enrollments fell. By 1986 universal secondary education was part of the nine-year compulsory education law that made primary education (six years) and junior-middle-school education (three years) mandatory. The desire to consolidate existing schools and to improve the quality of key middle schools was, however, under the education reform, more important than expanding enrollment.
The ACT (; originally an abbreviation of American College Testing) is a standardized test used for college admissions in the United States. It was first introduced in November 1959 by University of Iowa professor Everett Franklin Lindquist as a competitor to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). It is currently administered by ACT, a nonprofit organization of the same name.
Standardized testing in Alberta was first known to be introduced in 1892 by the government of the Northwest Territories, of which modern day Alberta was originally part of. The government instituted the examinations as it sought to attain greater accountability and ensure its students were well regarded when applying to tertiary institutions. As a result, today the territorial governments of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut use the Alberta curriculum. There are two types of provincially administered standardized testing in Alberta and the territories: Provincial Achievement Tests (PATs) and Diploma Examinations (diplomas). Depending on the course, these tests may be administered in English or French. Alberta, out of all Canadian provinces has the most standardized testing procedure of any province. See also List of Canadian primary and secondary examinations.
It is thought that the first school in the USA to introduce RFID technology was Spring Independent School District near Houston, Texas. In 2004, it gave 28,000 students RFID badges to record when students got on and off school buses. This was expanded in 2008 to include location tracking on school campuses.
Parents protested in January 2005 when Brittan Elementary School issued RFID to the students. Administrators at a school in Sutter, California, were offered money to test RFID from InCom and issued RFID-chipped ID tags to students. Students and parents felt they were not fully informed about the RFID and questioned the tactics the school used to implement the program, and the ethics of the monetary deal the school made with the company to test and promote its product. Parents quickly squashed the program with help from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Large population state testing began in the 1970s, and in the 1980s America began to assess nationally. In 2012, together 45 states is annual spending on assessments cost $27 per student and $669 million overall. However, once test involved administrative costs were included the cost per student increased to $1100. The need for the federal government to make meaningful comparisons across a highly de-centralized (locally controlled) public education system has also contributed to the debate about standardized testing, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that required standardized testing in public schools. U.S. Public Law 107-110, known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, further ties public school funding to standardized testing. The goal of No Child Left Behind was to improve the education system in the United States by holding school and teachers accountable and attempting to close the educational gap between minority and non-minority children in public schools. Students' results on standardized tests were used to allocate funds and other resources such as teachers and administrators to schools. This policy does not provide a federal standard for schools, but allows each state to set their own standards. The Every Student Succeeds Act replaced the NCLB. It was signed into law by President Obama on December 10, 2015. This act was created in order to revise the provisions of the NCLC in order to further allow student achievement and success.