Psychometricians’ Beliefs About Learning

The author contends that disputes within the measurement community about what constitutes legitimate test preparation and whether “teaching to the test” is good or bad for student learning can be explained by differences in measurement specialists beliefs about learning. Qualitative analysis of interview data from a nationally representative sample of 50 district testing directors revealed that approximately half of the measurement specialists operate from implicit learning theories that advocate, first, close alignment of tests with curriculum and, second, judicious teaching of tested content. Historical quotations are used to show that these beliefs, associated with criterion-referenced testing, derive from behaviorist learning theory, which requires sequential mastery of constituent skills and explicit testing of each learning step. The sequential, facts-before-thinking model of learning is contradicted, however, by a substantial body of evidence from cognitive psychology. Implicit beliefs should be made explicit because an understanding of learning theory assumptions is fundamental to evaluating evidence of testing effects and therfore to framing validity investigations.