The 2014 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing: What Teachers Initially Need to Know

Abstract

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014) were redesigned with test developers as the intended audience. Such a target audience excludes classroom teachers, who make up a significant portion of the workforce administering tests and interpreting test data to make meaningful inferences about student abilities. Although the primary audience identified in the new Standards is the test development community, a secondary audience – teachers – would benefit from familiarizing themselves with the current guidelines to be able to be able to guard against test misuse. The ability for teachers to interpret, articulate, and cite the Standards can improve teacher experiences in circumstances in which test data might be misused and negatively impact teachers, students, and families. The goal of this paper is to provide teachers with a brief overview of three issues in current educational practices related to the use of test data in high stakes decision-making, and to contextualize each issue using the Standards. Given that the target audience for the Standards excludes classroom teachers, the paper will focus on sections that are aligned with impacts on teacher practices, and only briefly mention issues related to classroom teaching practices.