One information processing technique that is helpful is maintenance rehearsal. There are pros and cons to using this techniques to prepare students for testing. One of the pros is that if a students rehearses the information enough, it will become automatic and will be much easier to retrieve during the test. The cons to using this technique for teaching is that this method does not always connect the material to other experiences in the child's life. Therefore, the information is not always encoded in the student's long term memory.
It is very possible for a high stakes test to cause learned helplessness in a child. Students spend a lot of time preparing for the standardized test. It is very possible that a student who does the preparations could have other factors that cause them to receive a bad grade. This might result in a student feeling as if no matter how hard they prepare, they will never be able to score high on any standardized test.
A consistent learning goal that could be used when teaching for a standardized test would be something along the lines of the students being able to correctly answer questions that require them to retrieve pieces of information from their memory. Students could be assessed on this learning goal by teachers giving then practice quizzes and pop quizzes to test how well they can retrieve the information.
I think this is a good learning goal because it is an obtainable. This would be a goal that teachers could reach or at least for the majority of the students. The teacher should maybe do things other than just quizzes to help them learn like activities or group work.
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