Evaluation of Scholarly Sources

In the blog post below, you will be reading the analysis of two scholarly sources I found through the U of A databases pertaining to the educational debate of the benefit of standardized testing and common core compared to its detriment. The analysis will be a brief summary of the source and it's general details which can help determine credibility (such as author, its publisher and location, etc.).

Miyagisan, Matt "My books for this semester"
8/16/09via flickr
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The first scholarly source I found the was a helpful resource for my topic was on the JSTOR database. This journal article, entitled "High Stakes Testing and Students: Stopping or Perpetuating a Cycle of Failure", was written in 2003 by Catherine Horn. It is intended to be an informative piece on the gains we make from standardized testing, as well as its weak points. The article is heavily composed of references, quotes, and statistics gathered from reliable professionals and studies (none of these are link directly to a sight, but all pieces of information are sighted at the end of the article).

The article is intended for an audience who is well invested in education and the testing debate, based on its complex references and terminology of the topic. The author provides insight for both sides of the debate, while remaining entirely neutral. She directly correlates the increase of standardized testing to President Bush's renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which implemented No Child Left Behind). She concludes that the use of testing is necessary but not all encompassing and the pressures we put on students to claim accountability is far too much when the tests themselves do not represent every student's strengths.


The second scholarly source, an article entitled "Tests Should Be a Priority, But Not At Expense of Other Skills" was found on the LexisNexis database. It is a brief article with the purpose of convincing their reader of the importance of standardized tests despite their narrow focus high expenses. It is published by the Indianapolis Business Journal of June 4, 2012. This makes this source a little more up to date in comparison with my other scholarly source. The audience is meant to be intellectuals who will read an education column of this paper. It is not written for people specifically in the field, but rather people who can understand the general foundation of the topic without too much thought.

There is no author provided, which is a concern and makes it harder to judge the validity of the article itself. It's presence in a database helps to reaffirm its credibility, but it still remains a concern. It also lacks specific evidence from professionals and reliable sources, only referring back to another member of the newspaper for insight. Never the less, the article makes sound arguments and conveys a non-argumentative purpose, which eases the concern of a reader for bias. This source is the weaker of the two that I examined, but it still provided insight to the debate of standardized testing even further.

I found both sources by searching the same phrase: standardized testing. This wielded many results, most pertaining to my debate in some way or another because most articles regarding the topic weigh the cost and benefits of these tests.