Critics of test-based accountability warn that test preparation has a negative influence on teachers' instruction due to a focus on procedural skills. Others advocate that the adoption of more rigorous assessments may be a way to incentivize more ambitious test preparation instruction. Drawing on classroom observations and teacher surveys, we do…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…