Faculty and Staff

Background & Objective:
Over the past several decades, systematic reviews have become a major part of the biomedical research literature landscape. While systematic reviews were originally developed for medicine and its related fields, they are now published in other disciplines. Our initial goal was to broadly investigate and describe the non-health sciences subject areas and disciplines that are publishing systematic reviews. Specifically, our research questions were,“What disciplines outside of the health sciences are adopting systematic reviews as a research method?” and “What implications may this have for health sciences librarianship?” Based on our initial findings, we will propose avenues for future research.

Methods & Discussion:
We conducted a search in the Scopus database to serve as a representative sample of the research literature. We searched for the phrase “systematic review*” in the article title or abstract, and limited the results to review articles from journals. We filtered out articles published in health sciences disciplines using the Scopus subject categories, and examined the articles that remained. The resulting set of titles was screened by two independent reviewers in a stepwise fashion. First we read the titles, then the abstracts, then the full text of remaining articles to determine if each was a systematic review and addressed a topic outside of the health sciences. We reconciled any differences for citations on which there was not initial consensus between reviewers. Lastly, we examined each remaining article to categorize its subject area or discipline. Our initial search included a number of systematic reviews outside the health science disciplines, and will yield data that has implications for librarians in the health sciences and in disciplines outside the health sciences field.

The recent battle reported from Washington about proposed national testing program does not tell the most important political story about high stakes tests. Politically popular school accountability systems in many states already revolve around statistical results of testing with high-stakes environments. The future of high stakes tests thus does not depend on what happens on Capitol Hill. Rather, the existence of tests depends largely on the political culture of published test results. Most critics of high-stakes testing do not talk about that culture, however. They typically focus on the practice legacy of testing, the ways in which testing creates perverse incentives against good teaching.

More important may be the political legacy, or how testing defines legitimate discussion about school politics. The consequence of statistical accountability systems will be the narrowing of purpose for schools, impatience with reform, and the continuing erosion of political support for publicly funded schools. Dissent from the high-stakes accountability regime that has developed around standardized testing, including proposals for professionalism and performance assessment, commonly fails to consider these political legacies. Alternatives to standardized testing which do not also connect schooling with the public at large will not be politically viable.

This paper presents a Bayesian framework for evaluative classification. Current education policy debates center on arguments about whether and how to use student test score data in school and personnel evaluation. Proponents of such use argue that refusing to use data violates both the public’s need to hold schools accountable when they use taxpayer dollars and students’ right to educational opportunities. Opponents of formulaic use of test-score data argue that most standardized test data is susceptible to fatal technical flaws, is a partial picture of student achievement, and leads to behavior that corrupts the measures.

A Bayesian perspective on summative ordinal classification is a possible framework for combining quantitative outcome data for students with the qualitative types of evaluation that critics of high-stakes testing advocate. This paper describes the key characteristics of a Bayesian perspective on classification, describes a method to translate a naïve Bayesian classifier into a point-based system for evaluation, and draws conclusions from the comparison on the construction of algorithmic (including point-based) systems that could capture the political and practical benefits of a Bayesian approach. The most important practical conclusion is that point-based systems with fixed components and weights cannot capture the dynamic and political benefits of a reciprocal relationship between professional judgment and quantitative student outcome data.

The spread of academic testing for accountability purposes in multiple countries has obscured at least two historical purposes of academic testing: community ritual and management of the social structure. Testing for accountability is very different from the purpose of academic challenges one can identify in community “examinations” in 19th century North America, or exams’ controlling access to the civil service in Imperial China. Rather than testing for ritual or access to mobility, the modern uses of testing are much closer to the state-building project of a tax census, such as the Domesday Book of medieval Britain after the Norman Invasion, the social engineering projects described in James Scott's Seeing like a State (1998), or the “mapping the world” project that David Nye described in America as Second Creation (2004). This paper will explore both the instrumental and cultural differences among testing as ritual, testing as mobility control, and testing as state-building.

In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida's schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.