The Data Delusion: On average, it’s a bit more complicated. With apologies to Richard Dawkins… Increasingly I am becoming frustrated by . As a consequence, all kinds of perverse and spurious conclusions are drawn and school, teachers and policy makers end up jumping through hoops that have no real basis. If we’re not careful, we’re going to lose sight of what matters….if we haven’t done so already. I will try to illustrate the point… always conscious that inevitably I will be over-simplifying, so please bear that in mind. There are two major issues with the measurement of educational outcomes: So, in this context of complexity, naturally enough, we try to create order.
It is sensible enough to agree on a curriculum defining things that should be known and understood (whether the Government should decide this or not is another issue.) More subtly, we can assess complex accretions of learning From questions to basic tests and assessment tasks right up to long exams and extended pieces of work, . Norm-referencing. . Like Loading... The school data problem: what we have vs. what we need. (By Alan Brandt – AP) It’s the backbone of the modern school reform: data.
And a lot of it, it turns out, isn’t any good. Here’s a post about the problem of the data we have vs. the data we need, by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, who confronted the issue recently when he helped the Boston Globe create a rating tool for schools in Massachusetts. Schneider is the author of “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools” and the upcoming ”From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education.”
By Jack Schneider For the past two years, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been striking bargains with state departments of education, waiving some of the most unreasonable and restrictive accountability provisions of federal education law. Standardized tests given to K-12 students are not without merit. Our experience was instructive.
Changing The Language From Anti-Testing To Pro-Whole Child - The Jose Vilson. I like getting into discussions with people who like saying “Jose, why are you against testing?” Let me lay out the argument and the reason why, instead of referring to myself as anti-testing, I’m calling myself pro-whole-child. The argument is that testing isn’t bad. We should have experts who look at the lay of the education land, help set standards for what children ought to learn at every grade, and then help develop assessments that help us get a glimpse as to whether students learned that material. Testing seems more stable, and less prone to error since these guys spend their working hours on developing precise problems and test them on children and adults to make certain that the problems absolutely mean to assess what they mean to assess.
Plus, having these common assessments between grade levels could make for interesting longitudinal studies and provide critical feedback for teachers, parents, and students about student and teacher performance. Jose. Using Outcomes in Moodle. Outcomes are specific descriptions of what a student has demonstrated and understood at the completion of an activity or course.
Each outcome is rated by some sort of scale. Other terms for outcomes are Competencies and Goals. In simple terms outcomes are similar to sub components of a grade. A grade is an assessment of overall performance that may include tests, participation, attendance and projects. Outcomes assess specific levels of knowledge through a series of statements, that maybe coded with numbers or letters. Thus an overall grade can be given for a course, along with statements about specific competencies in the form of outcomes. Enabling outcomes Go to Site administration > Advanced features and ensure that Enable outcomes is checked (by default, it isn't). Using outcomes Choose or define some outcomes for your course (see below). Outcomes report The outcomes report is a table with 6 columns: Short name - the short name of the outcome used in this course. Outcomes used in course.
Grade export in Moodle. Grades can be exported to Excel spreadsheet, OpenDocument spreadsheet, plain text file or XML file. Grade export is NOT intended for students. How to export grades Grade export To export grades from the gradebook: Choose an export format from the gradebook dropdown menu. XML file export To export grades to XML file, you need to ensure that: Users have ID numbers (an optional field in the user profile) Activities have ID numbers (an optional field in the common module settings) Default grade export settings The grade export display type and grade export decimal points site-wide defaults may be set by an administrator in Site administration > Grades > General settings. Grade publishing Grade publishing settings Grade publishing is a way of importing and exporting grades via a URL without being logged in to Moodle.
Grade publishing is disabled by default. To determine the URL for exporting grades, follow an export format link e.g. Grade export capabilities Tips and tricks See also. Assessment Liaison 13-14 Session 1 Notes. Data Driven Instruction Shifts.