Ep. 72 - Dec. 10, 2018 - Test Scores and Long-Term Outcomes: Why the Disconnect?

Researchers and policymakers are often puzzled when a policy like high quality preschool or class size reduction is found to have no impact on student test scores but a positive impact on longer-term outcomes like college graduation or future earnings. A new paper by Eric Nielsen can help explain these different findings. It turns out that the way we calculate test scores may be disguising the true impact of these policies. Eric Nielsen joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss his paper, “Test Items, Outcomes, and Achievement Gaps.” http://papers.nber.org/conf_papers/f115410/f115410.pdf