‘Teaching to the Test’: Dim Ethical Area for Educators

For 20 minutes every morning for the last month, teacher Ilene Weise’s combination third- and fourth-grade class at the 10th Street School in downtown Los Angeles tackled a red-and-white workbook jammed with short tests on spelling, arithmetic, grammar and reading.

They were asked to do such things as read simple equations, solve word problems, find missing punctuation marks and misspelled words, and recognize sentences that described “events that cannot happen in real life,” such as: “The crickets made oatmeal for breakfast.”

The goal of all this cramming, as the workbook’s title plainly advertised, is “scoring high” on the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, a standardized exam many schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are scheduled to begin giving this week--and one of two major skills tests given annually by district schools. The format and items in the booklet, “Scoring High on the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,” which is widely used in district schools, closely resemble items on the actual test.

While Weise, who has taught at the inner-city school for five years, made sure her students performed the drills, she said she wishes she could have spent the precious class time differently: “I’d rather be teaching,” she said wistfully.

Her lament was echoed by other teachers and by testing experts interviewed last week who said that, as standardized testing to assess school quality has escalated, so has “teaching to the test”--a term that covers a confusing array of test-preparation activities, ranging from outright cheating to types of reviewing that are ethically more acceptable but troubling nonetheless.

Recent disclosures of cheating statewide on the California Assessment Program (CAP) test of basic academic skills have rekindled concerns about how far schools should go to prepare students for standardized tests. While educators agree that tampering with or providing students with test answers is unethical, dishonest and just plain wrong, they are split, for instance, on whether it is OK to drill students on items similar to what appears on the test. Some would even argue against familiarizing pupils with the exam format, such as knowing that some questions will be multiple choice and others fill-in-the-blank.

Ethical Conduct Gray Area

Exactly what constitutes ethical conduct in readying students for standardized tests opens up a vast gray area. And yet, with such high stakes riding on test scores, it is more important than ever, educators say, to ensure that test results are not inflated through coaching or cribbing.

An estimated 2.5 million standardized tests are given to California school children each year, not including the annual CAP exam. Also not included are college entrance tests, which are not given to all students and for which coaching generally is considered more acceptable. Nationwide, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a nonprofit group in Cambridge, Mass., that monitors standardized testing, more than 100 million standardized exams are administered annually to 40 million elementary and secondary pupils.

Test scores are used by parents to judge the quality of schools and make decisions about where to live, by educators to determine the strengths and weaknesses of curriculum and instruction, by district administrators to judge the performance of principals, and by legislators and other officials to shape public policy and hold schools accountable. Newspapers publish scores from the CAP test, which public schools are required to give annually to third-, sixth-, 11th- and 12th-grade pupils, and the state considers the test so important that for two years it offered cash awards in the thousands of dollars to high schools that raised their scores even by a few points.

Teaching to Test Widespread

Although no studies have been done to determine the extent and nature of “teaching to the test” in public schools, “the impression of many educators,” said University of Colorado educational testing expert Lorrie Shepard, “is that these practices are increasing in response to high-stakes testing.”

One of the most egregious examples of teaching to the test cited by testing experts occurred in the San Diego City Unified School District in 1981, when the district was under a court order from a school desegregation case to substantially raise the test scores at 23 low-scoring minority schools. An administrator admitted writing study materials and warmup tests for those schools which exactly duplicated numerous items from the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills.

Every third item on a district-written reading test “was lifted off the CTBS and (the wording) was turned around backwards,” said San Diego State University Prof. Thomas Nagel, an integration specialist involved in the investigation.

Some experts would say that the San Diego case was an example of teaching from the test rather than to the test, an important distinction.

Perils in Over-Familiarity

Bill Bibbiani, director of testing for the Pasadena Unified School District, said over-familiarity with a test can be dangerous and lead to teaching from the test. “If you know the concept of two-digit numbers times three-digit numbers is on the test and you teach it, great. If you happen to remember that question 72 is 21 times 319 and you teach that, that’s flat-out cheating. That is teaching from the test.”

Bibbiani said, however, that because educators and test-makers generally agree on what youngsters ought to know at each grade level, it would be hard not to teach the specific skills that standardized tests measure. “If you know a particular concept is going to be tested and it’s going to be included on the test every year, you’re a masochist if you don’t teach it. A good teacher is going to cover hundreds and thousands of other skills, but would be pretty foolish not to include the skills which are tested. That is my idea of teaching to the test.”

Educators and experts say that legitimate “teaching to the test” can mean:

- Teaching test-taking skills and strategies, such as how to mark an answer sheet, having some familiarity with the format, and knowing that a multiple-choice question, for instance, could include two answers that seem almost the same.

- Teaching items that cover similar subjects but in a different form.

‘Curriculum Alignment’

- Designing curriculum to include areas being tested--a practice educators call “curriculum alignment.”

And although many teachers say they would consider teaching the same or closely comparable material wrong, others acknowledge that it happens--and see nothing wrong with it.

“We have copies of the test before it is given,” a recently retired Los Angeles school district elementary teacher, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, said about the district’s standardized tests. “If the test is given in April or May and you have not covered all that is in the test, that’s not fair. So you use problems like those and put them on the board. Many, many teachers teach the test. And you can’t blame them.”

Los Angeles District Supt. Leonard Britton said making students “test-wise” is sound educational practice, so long as it concentrates on mechanics and not the specific content of the exam. “I’m sure somewhere out there are staff members who probably restrict their teaching (to what is covered in) testing. We try to encourage them not to. . . . Teaching only to a test is very limiting.”

San Diego Schools Supt. Thomas W. Payzant, who was not superintendent when the 1981 test duplication was uncovered, said: “It is very clear that we should not be teaching test items or anything that could be construed as close to teaching to test items. . . . (But) we are supportive of teachers working with children on test-taking skills, such as familiarizing them with the format of a test and how to deal with answer sheets. Those kinds of things are very legitimate.”

Stricter View Expressed

However, H. D. Hoover, an education professor at the University of Iowa and one of the authors of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills--which is taken by 5 million school children annually--takes a stricter view.

“(With) any kind of teaching to the test that has the sole purpose of making kids’ scores look better, you have to ask, what purpose is this serving? You’re probably stealing time better spent on direct instruction.”

The “Scoring High” materials, published by Random House, are used in “30% to 40%” of schools statewide and nationally, said Random House regional manager Murell Peddicord. In California, schools use the workbooks tailored for the CTBS and the CAP exams. While the booklets do not duplicate items found on those tests, Peddicord acknowledged that they contain questions that are “close.” And he said that is not wrong.

“ ‘Scoring High’ prepares kids to understand what is on the tests. It doesn’t teach to the test,” Peddicord said.

Associate Supt. Lorna Round, who supervises instruction in the Los Angeles Unified School District, said many schools use the books but she does not know exactly how many because they buy them on their own. Round said she does not know how effective the books are but believes they have some value in helping students gain confidence in test-taking.

‘Too Closely to the Test’

But William Mehrens, a Michigan State University education professor who has studied the “Scoring High” materials, said they “present material that teaches too closely to the test. . . . I would be very leery of the data” if a school had used the workbooks to get ready for the exam.

California issues a warning about test preparation in the CAP test examiner’s manual: “Use of any of the test materials or facsimiles of the materials to give children additional practice with the items, other than that provided by the Practice Test, is unethical and in violation of Education Code Section 60610 which prohibits ‘any program of specific preparation of the pupils within the district for the testing program.’ ”

But what exactly does that mean?

“It’s very clear you can’t use test items (to teach),” said state CAP consultant Pat McCabe. “From there, a lot of people argue we can’t even teach curriculum (that the test specifically covers). Some say if the test is aligned with the curriculum, that is preparation for the test. That is a much harder issue” than teaching directly from a test.

The danger in matching course content with test content, experts say, is that some schools might be tempted to overemphasize only the tested materials and ignore other important subjects or skills.

Subject Matter Left Out

In Virginia last year, for instance, some teachers reported that they did not teach addition and subtraction of fractions because the state’s minimum competency test only covered questions on multiplication and division of fractions, according to a recent report by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

The California Department of Education provides school districts with a guide to its CAP test that describes the types and number of questions that students will encounter. It includes sample test items, but warns school officials that “any effort to raise test scores by using these and similar items in a drill-and-practice manner is a serious misuse of the materials (and) a probable waste . . . of time.”

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that, compared to other standardized tests, such as CTBS, the CAP test is harder to teach to. One reason is that it includes more than 1,000 different questions, and within a given class of 30 pupils, for instance, each student would answer a different subset of items--a type of test experts call a “matrix sample.”

In addition, Honig said, the test is becoming more sophisticated, including at the 8th-grade level, for instance, writing and history exams that require deep knowledge acquired over time.

Praise for CAP Test

Even John Jacob Cannell, a New Mexico physician who authored a controversial study of standardized tests last year, praises the CAP test for much the same reason.

Honig said he “wouldn’t belittle the idea of (promoting) test awareness. It does help kids out” to learn methods for making the best use of the limited time given to answer questions and to know what areas of knowledge will be tested. But “if you’re given the exact questions, that’s over the line,” he said.

Nagel, the San Diego State University professor who was involved in the investigation seven years ago into questionable test preparation at several San Diego city schools, said he does not condone such blatant forms of teaching to the test. But he does approve, he said, of the pressure that was placed on those schools--and that, unfortunately, caused someone to duplicate test items in study materials. Although some educators complain that the increased public importance attached to standardized test scores is bad and conducive to cheating or unethical forms of teaching to the test, Nagel said that is hogwash.

Those 23 predominantly minority San Diego schools, which had scores that languished in the bottom quarter of schools nationwide before the district was forced to improve them, now rank around the 50th percentile on the CTBS test, which means that they score higher than 50% of elementary school children nationally--an “incredible rise,” Nagel said.

“A lot of people are going to say, ‘Oh, those poor dears, they’re getting all this pressure,’ ” he said. “In this instance, you’re talking about generations of children who were washed right down the drain to the lowest level of jobs, with no success ahead of them. That pressure, although it produced some scoundrels in the beginning, has also resulted in substantive changes in children’s lives which will cause them to be economic successes in thisworld.” Times staff writers Mary Barber and Bob Williams contributed to this story.

PREPARING FOR THE BIG TEST This booklet, “Scoring High on the Comprehnsive Tests of Basic Skills,” helps students prepare for standardized exams given to assess school quality. The booklet has sample tests on spelling, arithmetric, grammar and reading and offers test-taking tips for students.