High Stakes Research

UNLV professor Bo Bernhard is counting on research to help in the prevention and treatment of problem gambling in Southern Nevada and beyond

High-Stakes Tests Require High-Stakes Pedagogy

High-stakes mathematics tests continue to gain popularity in the United States, with an increasing number of states setting the passing of such tests as a high school graduation requirement. Consequently, instruction and instructional content have changed, with teachers emphasizing materials on the test while neglecting other important aspects of learning. The tests have become all-consuming, taking over many students\u27 lives. Yet students are often ill prepared for these tests. This is even more true for African-American students whose cultural and social circumstances make their preparation for high-stakes tests inadequate and ineffective. The author examines six such students - their hopes for the future, their preparation for the tests, and the impact of the tests on their lives

Against the iterated knowledge account of high-stakes cases

One challenge for moderate invariantists is to explain why we tend to deny knowledge to subjects in high stakes when the target propositions seem to be inappropriate premises for practical reasoning. According to an account suggested by Williamson, our intuitive judgments are erroneous due to an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between first-order and higher-order knowledge: the high-stakes subject lacks the latter but possesses the former. In this paper, I provide three objections to Williamson’s account: i) his account delivers counterintuitive verdicts about what it is appropriate for a high-stakes subject to do; ii) the high-stakes subject doesn’t need iterated knowledge in order to be regarded as appropriately relying on the relevant proposition in practical reasoning; iii) Williamson’s account doesn’t provide a good explanation of why the high-stakes subject would be blameworthy if she were relying on the relevant proposition in her practical reasoning

Seeking authenticity in high stakes mathematics assessment

This article derives from a scrutiny of over 100 national secondary mathematics examination papers in England, conducted as part of the Evaluating Mathematics Pathways project 2007-2010 by a team of eight researchers. The focus in this article is of the extent to which mathematics assessment items reflect and represent the current curriculum drive for increased mathematical applications in the curriculum. We show that whilst mathematics is represented as a human activity in the examinations, peopling assessment items may serve actually only to disguise the routinised calculations and procedural reasoning that largely remains the focus of the assessments, with the effect that classroom mathematics remains unchanged. We suggest that there are more opportunities for assessment items to illustrate mathematics in use, and we draw attention to ways of assessing mathematics that allow these opportunities to be taken

Editorial: Plotting new courses in assessment

The articles in this issue foreground some of the tensions inherent in the use of “global” summative, norm-referenced measures of literacy on the one hand, and “local”, site and classroom specific literacy assessments on the other. At a theoretical level these tensions may seem without basis given that “global” and “local” assessments seem to serve different masters and achieve different purposes. However, in reality the wash-back effect of high stakes systemic assessment on classroom work is widely accepted. Furthermore, these tensions are palpable in countries in which the results from high-stakes, high status “global” assessments can lead to the closure of schools. Several of the articles in this issue describe how teachers in schools and universities are attempting to steer a course around and between the omnipresent impact of high stakes assessments and their influence on curricula

High-Stakes Interpretation

Courts look at text differently in high-stakes cases. Statutory language that would otherwise be “unambiguous” suddenly becomes “less than clear.” This, in turn, frees up courts to sidestep constitutional conflicts, avoid dramatic policy changes, and, more generally, get around undesirable outcomes. The standard account of this behavior is that courts’ failure to recognize “clear” or “unambiguous” meanings in such cases is motivated or disingenuous, and, at best, justified on instrumentalist grounds. This Article challenges that account. It argues instead that, as a purely epistemic matter, it is more difficult to “know” what a text means—and, hence, more difficult to regard that text as “clear” or “unambiguous”—when the practical stakes are raised. For that reason, this Article insists, it is entirely rational for courts to be more cautious when interpreting text in high-stakes cases than they would be if the stakes were low. Drawing on contemporary work in philosophy of language and epistemology, this Article grounds its argument in the observation that ordinary speakers’ willingness to attribute “knowledge” or “clarity” decreases as the practical stakes increase. And while the technical explanations of this phenomenon vary, they all reflect a basic insight: that one needs greater epistemic justification to act on some premise the higher the practical stakes. To illustrate, this Article applies the above insight to various interpretive settings. Considering judicial review, for example, this Article explains that it makes good epistemic sense for a court to wait until it is really sure that a statute means what it thinks it means before taking the extraordinary step of invalidating that statute as unconstitutional. Similarly, this Article urges that it is just sound epistemic practice for a court is to construe a statute in a way that would unsettle an existing implementation regime only if it is especially well justified in its reading of the statutory text—that is, only if it really knows that its reading is correct. This Article thus offers at least a partial justification of courts’ seemingly loose treatment of statutory text when the practical stakes are raised. And it does so, in contrast to prior scholarly efforts, by appeal to reasons that both formalists and instrumentalists can accept

High-Stakes Interpretation

Courts look at text differently in high-stakes cases. Statutory language that would otherwise be ‘unambiguous’ suddenly becomes ‘less than clear.’ This, in turn, frees up courts to sidestep constitutional conflicts, avoid dramatic policy changes, and, more generally, get around undesirable outcomes. The standard account of this behavior is that courts’ failure to recognize ‘clear’ or ‘unambiguous’ meanings in such cases is motivated or disingenuous, and, at best, justified on instrumentalist grounds. This Article challenges that account. It argues instead that, as a purely epistemic matter, it is more difficult to ‘know’ what a text means—and, hence, more difficult to regard that text as ‘clear’ or ‘unambiguous’—when the practical stakes are raised. For that reason, this Article insists, it is entirely rational for courts to be more cautious when interpreting text in high-stakes cases than they would be if the stakes were low. Drawing on contemporary work in philosophy of language and epistemology, this Article grounds its argument in the observation that ordinary speakers’ willingness to attribute ‘knowledge’ or ‘clarity’ decreases as the practical stakes increase. And while the technical explanations of this phenomenon vary, they all reflect a basic insight: that one needs greater epistemic justification to act on some premise the higher the practical stakes. To illustrate, this Article applies the above insight to various interpretive settings. Considering judicial review, for example, this Article explains that it makes good epistemic sense for a court to wait until it is really sure that a statute means what it thinks it means before taking the extraordinary step of invalidating that statute as unconstitutional. Similarly, this Article urges that it is just sound epistemic practice for a court is to construe a statute in a way that would unsettle an existing implementation regime only if it is especially well justified in its reading of the statutory text, i.e. only if it really knows that its reading is correct. This Article thus offers at least a partial justification of courts’ seemingly loose treatment of statutory text when the practical stakes are raised. And it does so, in contrast to prior scholarly efforts, by appeal to reasons that both formalists and instrumentalists can accept

High Stakes Behavior with Low Payoffs: Inducing Preferences with Holt-Laury Gambles

A continuing goal of experiments is to understand risky decisions when the decisions are important. Often a decision’s importance is related to the magnitude of the associated monetary stake. Khaneman and Tversky (1979) argue that risky decisions in high stakes environments can be informed using questionnaires with hypothetical choices (since subjects have no incentive to answer questions falsely.) However, results reported by Holt and Laury (2002, henceforth HL), as well as replications by Harrison (2005) suggest that decisions in “high” monetary payoff environments are not well-predicted by questionnaire responses. Thus, a potential implication of the HL results is that studying decisions in high stakes environments requires using high stakes. Here we describe and implement a procedure for studying high-stakes behavior in a low-stakes environment. We use the binary-lottery reward technique (introduced by Berg, et al (1986)) to induce preferences in a way that is consistent with the decisions reported by HL under a variety of stake sizes. The resulting decisions, all of which were made in a low-stakes environment, reflect surprisingly well the noisy choice behavior reported by HL’s subjects even in their highstakes environment. This finding is important because inducing preferences evidently requires substantially less cost than paying people to participate in extremely high-stakes games.