What classroom practices produce high test scores?
New research is showing that teaching a curriculum aligned to state standards and using test data as feedback produces higher test scores than an instructional emphasis on memorization and test-taking skills. This means that many of the negative responses to testing that experts have warned against—notably, the drill n’ kill curriculum and so-called test prep—aren’t likely to produce the test score gains these reductive practices are intended to achieve. These findings should be of great importance to the many teaching professionals out there who have agonized over sacrificing rich learning experiences in order to do what they believed would prepare their students for the state test. This research affirms their judgment about what constitutes good instruction and it pays off in higher test scores. This is not to say that teachers have carte blanche. The key word in these findings is alignment: both aligning curriculum to state standards and aligning instruction in response to data. A 5
