Joanna writes poetry, participates in student government, and composes piano music. She'd like to become a science journalist someday because people "make better decisions when well informed."
Joanna noticed that everyone seemed to have an opinion about the likely effectiveness of the No Child Left Behind law. She wanted some data to test these opinions. She hypothesized that student achievement on tests would decline as the perceived difficulty of the test increased. Her goal was to find out whether teachers could set student expectations to improve test performance.
Joanna developed three vocabulary tests of equivalent difficulty (as shown via testing of a control group). She labeled one a sixth-grade test, one an eighth-grade test, and one a tenth-grade test. She provided instructions to homeroom teachers who administered the test for her and had students use their locker numbers instead of names to ensure that confidentiality was maintained. The test was given to 154 eighth graders over a period of three weeks. Joanna tabulated the results and found that students performed significantly better on the supposed sixth-grade test than on the other two. She concluded that if students expect an easy test, they perform better.
