Scholarly Articles & Standardized Testing

The end of the spring semester is coming up for us college students and as a final project in my advanced composition class, I am required to put together a multi-modal, research driven, persuasive argument.  The aspects of this project include a research paper and some other mode of presentation (a slideshow in my case).

Standardized testing has increased in popularity with each year since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act was approved of by the federal government in 2001.  Schools are using these tests as the "accountability measures" required in NCLB.  I have chosen to research these standardized tests for my project, in order to acknowledge the fact that, while these tests are beneficial to some students and to the curriculum, they should NOT be used as exit exams.  One scholarly article I am going to utilize in my paper is a journal article entitled, 'To leave or not to leave?  A regression discontinuity analysis of the impact of failing the high school exit exam.' written by Dongshu Ou.  Ou is an assistant professor in the department of educational administration and policy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I know this is a scholarly article because the author is a P.H.D, which she received from Columbia University, a rather distinguished university if I may add.  Also, the journal in which this article was published is a peer-reviewed journal entitled Economics of Education Review, which means that the content is professionally accurate, and encompasses my topic within its scope.

In the analysis, Ou first gives the audience background information about what standardized tests are and how they have been implemented in our school systems as of yet.  She then continues on to make the claim that students who barely fail the high school exit exam(s) have a significantly lower likelihood of making it to post-secondary education than students that barely passed these exams.  Ou also states that, in a lower-income or non-english proficient setting, the stakes are raised, and those students who barely failed were now significantly more likely to drop out of high school before graduating than their counterparts that barely passed the exams.  Ou backs up these claims in the rest of her analysis by concentrating her statistical research efforts to New Jersey high schools from 2002 to 2006.  Using various data sources Ou proved through her New Jersey examples, that all of her previous claims were in fact true.

Let me know in comments if this topic is something that interests you and I will try to remember to share my paper with you upon completion.

Ou, Dongshu. “To leave or not to leave?  A regression analysis of the impact of failing the high school exit exam.” Economics of Education Review 29.2 (2010): 171-186. Web. 10 April. 2013.