The Impact of Standardised Testing on Later High Stakes Test Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Standardised tests are a common, yet contentious, feature of many countries’ schooling systems. In May 2010, over one-quarter of English primary schools boycotted that year’s mandatory age eleven standardised tests (colloquially known as SATs tests). This paper investigates the plausibly causal effect of participation in standardised testing on later end-of-schooling qualification (GCSE) attainment. After controlling for non-random boycott participation, and relying on a selection-on-observables argument, evidence is found of a statistically significant negative effect of boycott participation on various measures of GCSE attainment. Amongst other findings, pupils are estimated to be 0.7 per-cent less likely to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C due to not sitting their age eleven SATs tests. Thus, evidence is found that individual pupils’ subsequent attainment benefits from their own prior participation in standardised tests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".