How Testing Came to Dominate American Schools: The History of Educational Assessment

by Gerard Giordano

Overview

Although originally designed as instruments to gauge students’ progress, tests eventually were used to modify curricula, learning materials, pedagogy, and many practical features of schooling. Tests were employed to shape attitudes toward national issues such as employment, immigration, and defense. Worried about the enormous consequences that were at stake, advocates and opponents pitched their cases to educators, parents, journalists, and policymakers and also targeted special audiences. Testing proponents pleaded with military leaders, businesspeople, and scholastic publishers while their adversaries appealed to job seekers, college applicants, racial minorities, and anti-establishmentarians. This book illustrates how all of these parties showed interest; many became passionate; and some decisively influenced the course of American educational testing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820472553
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	04/26/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)

About the Author

The Author: Gerard Giordano is Professor and Provost at the University of North Florida. He has written nearly two hundred reports that have appeared in national journals. He is the author of two tests, numerous chapters, and six previous books, including Twentieth-Century Textbook Wars: A History of Advocacy and Opposition (Peter Lang, 2003) and Wartime Schools: How World War II Changed American Education (Peter Lang, 2004).