No high-achieving nation tests every child, every year, in the way we're currently doing. They have much more intellectually ambitious assessments [or measuring not just memory but what students can do with knowledge].-- Ed Finkel, 2010

As the epigraph above emphasizes, during an era when critical thinking skills have assumed new importance, young people's academic and professional careers are still being controlled by high-stakes standardized testing regimes and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for student performance. As a result, it is little wonder that there has been a growing tendency on the part of many educators to "teach to the test." Indeed, and as also underscored by the epigraph above, the classroom testing process itself can be viewed as being counterproductive to the extent that it detracts from long-term learning and the development of the critical thinking skills young people need today to be competitive in the workplace. This paper reviews the literature to demonstrate how testing tends to overlook the importance of long-term learning, followed by a summary of the research and important findings about the implications of testing on long-term learning in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

So-called "teaching to the test" simply means that classroom teachers focus coursework on the contents of upcoming tests, including the high-stakes... For instance, according to one educator, "High-stakes, standardized tests have become ubiquitous in public education in the United States. Teachers across the country are feeling the intensified pressures from high-stakes testing policies and are responding to these pressures by teaching to the tests in varying ways" (Au, 2009, p. 43). While there has been an across-the-board increase in these pressures throughout the U.S. in recent years due to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Roach, 2014), some states have experienced these pressures differently, with teachers in lower-performing states being invariably more likely to teach to the test compared to their counterparts in higher-performing states (Au, 2009). Notwithstanding these state-level differences, however, there has also been a corresponding general increase in the use of standardized tests in the United States over the past 30 years that has profoundly affected the manner in which young people are evaluated for academic progress (Roach, 2014).
Given these criticisms, it is not surprising that current testing regimes in the U.S. have become the focus of an increasing amount of criticism from educators and policymakers alike who recognize the harmful long-term effects that these assessment methods can have on the development of the critical thinking skills that are needed by youth people…