ABSTRACT
A critically important, but often overlooked, characterization of standardized testing is that testing is a technology. Testing is deeply embedded in the American people’s perceptions, thoughts and experiences. It is a familiar, enduring, traditional part of our culture. However, partly due to its ubiquity, testing is generally not thought of as a social technology and a technical craft. Nonetheless, this is precisely what testing is: a technology embedded in such socio-technical systems as education, government and business. The technology of testing has its ‘hardware’, such as test booklets and answer sheets, and optical scoring machines that make the testing of large numbers efficient and economical. Increasingly, tests are administered by computers. More importantly however, testing, like much of present technology, is also disembodied knowledge and technical art; it is ‘instrumentality, employing special knowledge, that extends human effort beyond that of the unaided mind and hand’ (Lowrance 1986:33-4). And, like other technologies, testing also has a relevant community of technological practitioners who are trained for membership in that community and share a common language, rationale, and set of practices, procedures and methods (Staudenmaier 1985).
