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Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
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Summary

In recent years, there have been increasing efforts by the federal government and the states to devise systems that make students, teachers, principals, or whole school systems accountable for how much students learn. Large-scale tests are usually a key component of such systems. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 and the widespread use of high school exit exams in many states are two examples of a trend that has been going on for several decades.

The Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education was established by the National Research Council to review and synthesize research about how incentives affect behavior and to consider the implications of that research for educational accountability systems that attach incentives to test results. The committee focused on research about incentives in which an explicit consequence is attached to a measure of performance, starting first with basic research from the social and behavioral sciences and then turning to applied research in education.

BASIC RESEARCH ABOUT INCENTIVES

In reviewing basic research from the behavioral and social sciences about how incentives operate, the committee focused on theoretical research from economics and experimental research from psychology. Together, these two literatures show the way that subtle differences in the structure of incentives can be crucial in determining their effect. The

Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×

research review points to five key choices that should be considered in designing incentive systems:

1.   Who is targeted by the incentives: In complex organizations, incentives can be designed for people in different positions who can affect outcomes in different ways.

2.   What performance measures are used: The performance measures to which incentives are attached must be aligned with the desired outcomes for the incentives to have their desired effect.

3.   What consequences are used: The size and structure of the consequences provided by the incentives will affect how the incentives operate and should be designed to be appropriate to the situation.

4.   What support is provided: Without resources in support of organizational objectives, incentives can be discouraging to the very people they are intended to help, particularly if those people lack the capacity to reach the target that provides a reward or avoids a sanction.

5.   How incentives are framed and communicated: To be effective incentives need to be framed and communicated in ways that reinforce people’s commitment to the goal that incentives have been put in place to achieve, rather than in ways that erode that commitment.

The committee’s research review also identified three issues related to evaluating the success of incentive systems:

1.   Nonincentivized performance measures for evaluation: Incentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes. As a result, different performance measures—that are not being used in the incentives system—should be used when evaluating how the incentives are working.

2.   Changes in dispositions: In addition to evaluating the changes in a set of defined objective outcomes, it is important to consider the way incentive systems affect people’s dispositions to act when they are not being directly affected by the incentives.

3.   Weighing costs and benefits: Incentive systems will typically generate a mix of costs and benefits that have to be weighed against each other to determine the net value of the system.

TESTS AS PERFORMANCE MEASURES

The tests that are typically used to measure performance in education fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational

Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×

outcomes in many ways. This is important because the use of incentives for performance on tests is likely to reduce emphasis on the outcomes that are not measured by the test.

The academic tests used with test-based incentives obviously do not directly measure performance in untested subjects and grade levels or development of such characteristics as curiosity and persistence. However, those tests also fall short in measuring performance in the tested subjects and grades in important ways. Some aspects of performance in many tested subjects are difficult or even impossible to assess with current tests. And even for aspects of performance that can be tested, practical constraints on the length and cost of testing make it necessary to limit the content and types of questions. As a result, tests can measure only a subset of the content of a tested subject.

When incentives encourage teachers to focus narrowly on the material included on a particular test, scores on the tested portion of the content standards may increase while understanding of the untested portion of the content standards may stay the same or decrease. To the extent feasible, it is important to broaden the range of material included on tests to better reflect the full range of what students are expected to know and be able to do. And it is important to remember that the scores on the tests used with incentives may give an inflated picture of learning with respect to the full range of the content standards.

Incentives for educators are rarely attached directly to individual test scores; rather, they are usually attached to an indicator that combines and summarizes those scores in some way. Attaching consequences to different indicators created from the same test scores can produce dramatically different incentives. For example, an indicator constructed from average test scores or average test score gains will be sensitive to changes at all levels of achievement. In contrast, an indicator constructed from the percentage of students who meet a performance standard will be affected only by changes in the achievement of the students near the cut score defining the performance standard.

Given the broad outcomes that are the goals for education, the necessarily limited coverage of tests, and the ways that indicators constructed from tests focus on particular types of information, it is prudent to consider designing an incentive system that uses multiple performance measures. Incentive systems in other sectors have evolved toward using increasing numbers of performance measures on the basis of their experience with the limitations of particular performance measures. Over time, organizations look for a set of performance measures that better covers the full range of desired outcomes and also monitors behavior that would merely inflate the measures without improving outcomes.

Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×

INCENTIVE PROGRAMS REVIEWED

The committee’s literature review focused on studies that allowed us to draw causal conclusions about the overall effects of test-based incentive programs. We looked specifically for information about outcomes other than the high-stakes tests that have incentives attached in order to avoid having our conclusions biased by the test score inflation that the incentives may have caused. We also attempted to contrast different incentive programs according to the key features identified by the basic research in economic theory (the first four features noted above): who is targeted by the incentives, what performance measures are used, what consequences are used, and what support is provided. The existing literature did not allow us to contrast incentive programs according to the way they frame and communicate incentives, the key feature identified by the basic research in psychology (the fifth feature noted above).

We focused on 15 test-based incentive programs, including the large-scale policies of NCLB, its predecessors, and state high school exit exams, as well as a number of experiments and programs carried out in both the United States and other countries. These various programs involved a number of different incentive designs and substantial numbers of schools, teachers, and students.

CONCLUSIONS

Conclusion 1: Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number of programs. Even when evaluated using the tests attached to the incentives, a number of programs show only small effects. Programs in foreign countries that show larger effects are not clearly applicable in the U.S. context. School-level incentives like those of the No Child Left Behind Act produce some of the larger estimates of achievement effects, with effect sizes around 0.08 standard deviations, but the measured effects to date tend to be concentrated in elementary grade mathematics and the effects are small compared to the improvements the nation hopes to achieve.

Conclusion 2: The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in

Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×

the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement. The best available estimate suggests a decrease of 2 percentage points when averaged over the population. In contrast, several experiments with providing incentives for graduation in the form of rewards, while keeping graduation standards constant, suggest that such incentives might be used to increase high school completion.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY AND RESEARCH

The modest and variable benefits shown by test-based incentive programs to date suggest that such programs should be used with caution and that substantial further research is required to understand how they can be used successfully.

Recommendation 1: Despite using them for several decades, policy makers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education. Policy makers should support the development and evaluation of promising new models that use test-based incentives in more sophisticated ways as one aspect of a richer accountability and improvement process. However, the modest success of incentive programs to date means that all use of test-based incentives should be carefully studied to help determine which forms of incentives are successful in education and which are not. Continued experimentation with test-based incentives should not displace investment in the development of other aspects of the education system that are important complements to the incentives themselves and likely to be necessary for incentives to be effective in improving education.

Recommendation 2: Policy makers and researchers should design and evaluate new test-based incentive programs in ways that provide information about alternative approaches to incentives and accountability. This should include exploration of the effects of key features suggested by basic research, such as who is targeted for incentives; what performance measures are used; what consequences are attached to the performance measures and how frequently they are used; what additional support and options are provided to schools, teachers, and students in their efforts to improve; and how incentives are framed and communicated. Choices among the options for some or all of

Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×

these features are likely to be critical in determining which—if any—incentive programs are successful.

Recommendation 3: Research about the effects of incentive programs should fully document the structure of each program and should evaluate a broad range of outcomes. To avoid having their results determined by the score inflation that occurs in the high-stakes tests attached to the incentives, researchers should use low-stakes tests that do not mimic the high-stakes tests to evaluate how test-based incentives affect achievement. Other outcomes, such as later performance in education or work and dispositions related to education, are also important to study. To help explain why test-based incentives sometimes produce negative effects on achievement, researchers should collect data on changes in educational practice by the people who are affected by the incentives.

Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×
Page 1
Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×
Page 2
Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×
Page 3
Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×
Page 4
Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×
Page 5
Suggested Citation:"Summary." National Research Council. 2011. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12521.
×
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In recent years there have been increasing efforts to use accountability systems based on large-scale tests of students as a mechanism for improving student achievement. The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a prominent example of such an effort, but it is only the continuation of a steady trend toward greater test-based accountability in education that has been going on for decades. Over time, such accountability systems included ever-stronger incentives to motivate school administrators, teachers, and students to perform better.

Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education reviews and synthesizes relevant research from economics, psychology, education, and related fields about how incentives work in educational accountability systems. The book helps identify circumstances in which test-based incentives may have a positive or a negative impact on student learning and offers recommendations for how to improve current test-based accountability policies. The most important directions for further research are also highlighted.

For the first time, research and theory on incentives from the fields of economics, psychology, and educational measurement have all been pulled together and synthesized. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education will inform people about the motivation of educators and students and inform policy discussions about NCLB and state accountability systems. Education researchers, K-12 school administrators and teachers, as well as graduate students studying education policy and educational measurement will use this book to learn more about the motivation of educators and students. Education policy makers at all levels of government will rely on this book to inform policy discussions about NCLB and state accountability systems.

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