The Genre of Standardized Testing

I'm taking an assessment course this school year. Let me get it out in the open that I am a huge fan of authentic assessments and student-choice and rubrics, etc. As a classroom teacher, I often gave my students assignments that would push them to create--soundtracks, stage designs, costumes, meals...the list of possibilities was as long as their imaginations. So assessments were always fun. We did the typcial tests every now and then, and they had to learn research and be able to write papers, but there was a fun aspect to assessments in my English classroom.

With that said, I am intrigued by standardized testing. Research shows that high stakes testing is not an effective measurement of a student's growth. Yet we use it anyway. Since testing is not going to go away, it seems necessary that we learn to work within the boundaries that it can set up. We must teach our students how to cope with standardized testing just as we would teach any other genre in class.

So...standardized testing as a genre can lead me to some interesting study. Where to next? How do we implement it into daily learning? What can we do to help students cope with the cold, formal language of the tests that decide their future? Its something that I'm interested in looking into some more.