Turning Children into Data. August 25, 2010 A Skeptic’s Guide to Assessment Programs By Alfie Kohn Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. – Albert Einstein Programs with generic-sounding names that offer techniques for measuring (and raising) student achievement have been sprouting like fungi in a rainforest: “Learning Focused Schools,” “Curriculum Based Measurements,” “Professional Learning Communities,” and many others whose names include “data,” “progress,” or “RTI.” When I’m asked about one of these programs, I have to confess that I just can’t keep up with every new stall that opens in this bazaar — and the same is true of the neighboring marketplace that’s packed with discipline and classroom management programs.
Worth a try? Obviously we’re going to have to look a little deeper and ask a few pointed questions. 1. 2. 3. These teachers ultimately decided to reject the technocratic PLC approach in favor of an alternative they designed themselves. 4. 5. 6. ‘Life is not a multiple-choice test’ (www.nagb.org) (Correction: Fixing 33-year teaching degree to 33-year teaching career) I recently posted the resignation letter of Ron Maggiano, an award-winning social studies teacher at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, after a 33-year teaching career — four years shy of full retirement.
In the following post, Maggiano recalls his first day of teaching — and his last, and explains why he is leaving his job. By Ron Maggiano I will never forget that day. It was my first day as a classroom teacher. Fortunately, my fears were unfounded. Now more than three decades later, I have just spent my last day as a teacher. It was a difficult decision, but I am confident that it was the correct one. Research shows that today’s students need to be prepared to think critically, analyze problems, weigh solutions, and work collaboratively to successfully compete in the modern work environment.
And we are not preparing them for success at the college level or in the workplace. Document Deep Dive: What Was on the First SAT? SAT essay section: Problems with grading, instruction, and prompts. Photo courtesy Caleb Roenigk/Flickr This past Saturday, several hundred thousand prospective college students filed into schools across the United States and more than 170 other countries to take the SAT—$51 registration fees paid, No. 2 pencils sharpened, acceptable calculators at the ready. And as part of the three-hour-and-45–minute ritual, each person taking the 87-year-old test spent 25 minutes drafting a prompt-based essay for the exam’s writing section. This essay, which was added to the SAT in 2005, counts for approximately 30 percent of a test-taker’s score on the writing section, or nearly one-ninth of one’s total score.
That may not seem like much, but with competition for spots at top colleges and universities more fierce than ever, performance on a portion of the test worth around 11 percent of the total could be the difference between Stanford and the second tier. To do well on the essay, he says, the best approach is to just make stuff up. That’s one way of putting it. The View from Where I Standardize: Ruminations from the Test-Prep Industry: Playing the Game. There are a lot of people out there who like to win. We all know them. It goes down to their very core: the drive not only to survive or to be comfortable, but to survive better, be more comfortable. They want to be the best and they want for others to recognize that they’re the best. They want to win the game visibly, even if other, non-game-related things have to suffer. In my line of work, I come into contact with these people a lot. One SAT student I work with refuses to move forward with any lessons until we’ve graded his homework and calculated what percent he got right.
In order to engage the competitive impulses in an individual, the steps are simple: 1. 2. 3. It sounds obvious, but set up this structure and watch eyes light up, nostrils flare, sweat drop, and money pour out of pockets. And there’s nothing wrong with a competitive spirit. Take standardized testing. And it doesn’t stop with the ACT or SAT. Which brings us back to survival. When Grownups Take the SAT: Elizabeth Kolbert. Taking the SATs is not something to do lightly. Nevertheless, on a frigid Saturday morning not long ago, I found myself filing into a classroom with twenty sleep-deprived teen-agers. One of the girls was carrying two giant SAT review books studded with pink Post-its.
I couldn’t decide whether she’d brought them along to do some last-minute studying or to intimidate the competition. We’d been assigned to a chemistry classroom, and its walls were covered with placards offering a variety of emergency-evacuation instructions and motivational sayings. “If you aim for nowhere, that’s just where you’ll go,” one poster observed. “Some days you’re the pigeon,” another, written in runny, guano-colored letters, said. “Some days you’re the statue.” The proctor, who herself seemed oddly nervous, handed around the tests and the answer booklets. On this particular day, the essay question involved progress—does it require struggle and conflict? I considered my options.
. “ ‘How long till the polynomials?’ Why we need a moratorium on the high stakes of testing. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called late last month for a moratorium on the high stakes attached to new Common Core-aligned standardized tests. (You can read about that here .) Here’s a piece in support of that call, written by Jeff Bryant, an Associate Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and the owner of a marketing and communications consultancy. It serves numerous organizations including Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, PBS, and International Planned Parenthood Foundation. He writes extensively about public education policy at ourfuture.org. Follow Jeff on Twitter: jeffbcdm By Jeff Bryant By now it’s become clear to anyone willing to pay attention that our nation’s obsession over education standards and testing has gotten out of hand.
Ratcheting education standards ever higher at the same time we cut supports that schools and students need to reach those standards never made any sense to begin with. Test Obsession Runs Wild. Why schools are forcing some kids to ‘sit and stare’ for hours. A new policy is being enacted in some school districts across the country known as “sit and stare.” What is that? “Sit and stare” policies are enforced on those students whose parents have opted them out of taking a high-stakes standardized test but who are still required to be in the school building when the exams are actually proctored. Under this practice, kids are forced to sit at their desks and stare while their classmates take the test. They can’t read. They can’t write. They can’t put in earplugs and listen to music. “Sit and stare” policies are being considered or adopted in schools from New York to California as a reaction to the growing “opt out” movement in which parents have decided that they do not want their children to have to take high-stakes standardized tests.
While there are no definitive numbers about how many parents are opting their children out of tests, thousands have this year and the movement is gaining momentum. A Model for the National Assessment of Higher Orde. Richard Paul with Gerald M. Nosich Abstract This paper, co-authored by Richard Paul and Gerald Nosich, was commissioned by the United States Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the National Center for Education Statistics. It provides exactly what its title implies: a model for the national assessment of higher order thinking.
The paper consists of a preface and five main sections. The preface delineates the problem of lower order learning, summarizes the state of research into critical thinking and educational reform, and explains the five-part structure of the paper. The first main section of the paper states and explicates 21 criteria for higher order thinking assessment. Section One: Objectives What Should be the Main Objectives of a Process to Assess Higher Order Thinking? It should assess students’ skills and abilities in analyzing, synthesizing, applying, and evaluating information.
Section Two: Critical Thinking and Criteria for Assessment. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing | FairTest. Florida Backtracks on Standardized State Tests. The Truth about Learning to Read Well E D Hirsch. Barry Falls View full image Ample research shows that scores on fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are the most reliable predictors of Americans' future economic status and ability to become effective citizens.
Reading ability embraces multiple skills one needs in order to become effective in the public sphere. From the ability to understand strangers and make oneself understood in turn, other competencies flow. One can learn new things readily, prosper in school, and possess the general knowledge needed to train for a new job. No Child Left Behind reasonably places a big emphasis on reading tests, but that has unfortunately accounted for the unintended consequence that much time is being misspent on how-to skills and test preparation. Reading comprehension is not a universal, repeatable skill like sounding out words or throwing a ball through a hoop. The origin of cotton is something of a mystery.
Much tacit knowledge is needed to understand this passage. Dear Parents - A Must Read by Donald Sternberg – School Leadership 2. Want to read more of this type of posting? If you are not already a member of School Leadership 2.0, why not join today? More than 5,900 concerned and dedicated educators around the globe have already done so. It's easy, just click here to get started. September 4, 2012 Dear Parents, On behalf of the teachers and staff of the Wantagh Elementary School, I would like to welcome you back to school. I anticipate that the 2012-13 academic year will prove to be an exciting year. We are all enthusiastic about the arrival of our new superintendent, Mr. One significant issue as we move into this new school year is that we will, at times, find it difficult if not impossible to teach authentic application of concepts and skills with an eye towards relevancy.
Unfortunately, if educators want to survive in the new, Albany-created bureaucratic mess that is standardized assessments to measure teacher performance, paramount to anything else, we must focus on getting kids ready for the state assessments. Op-Ed: For One Sixth Grader, NJ ASK Is a Misguided Waste of Time, Money, and Effort. Because she couldn't opt out, this student simply made up her own answers for the state test I am a 6th grade student who recently took the NJ ASK. I am protesting this unnecessary test. I wished to opt out of the test, but my parents were unable to take me to school halfway through the day after the test. Because I could not opt out, I have instead decided to protest the test by creating my own answers and disregarding the prompt.
I do not mean to disrespect anyone by doing so, and if I do, I sincerely apologize. I believe that these tests are being used to unfairly evaluate teachers. They were not created to evaluate teachers; therefore, they should not be used to evaluate teachers as they currently are. The students do not always do as well as they could, because of being put under extreme amounts of pressure and having high stress levels. What's more, the students are unable to see what they did wrong. These tests do not truly measure the intelligence of the student. SAT exam to be redesigned. The famed SAT college admissions exam will undergo a thorough redesign by the College Board, which is calling it an “ambitious effort” to “better meet” the needs of students and schools.
The SAT, first given in 1926, was revamped less than a decade ago when a written essay was added and some of the question formats were changed. Last year, for the first time, it lost its designation as the most popular college admissions exam to the ACT, by a margin of a few thousand students. The College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns the SAT, late last year appointed a new president, David Coleman, who was a co-writer of the Common Core State Standards.
In a recent speech at the Brookings Institution, Coleman said he has a number of problems with the SAT as now written, including with its essay and vocabulary words. (You can read about that here.) College Board Vice President Peter Kauffmann said the following e-mail was sent to all members of the College Board: SAT Reading Scores Are the Lowest They've Been in 40 Years - Alexander Abad-Santos.
Coming in with an average SAT reading score of 496, 2012's graduating seniors have the dubious distinction of having attained the worst reading score since 1972. (For those test-takers of a certain age and test-taking history, "reading" is actually that part we knew as "verbal. ") Regardless of what you call(ed) it, "The average reading score for the Class of 2012 was 496, down one point from the previous year and 34 points since 1972," reports The Washington Post's Emma Brown, gleaning numbers from the College Board, the organization that administers the test.
What's troubling beyond the low average score is that seniors' scores in "writing," a section related to "reading" and for most of us, life in some way or another, also dropped—to 488—a decrease of nine points since the College Board started testing for it in 2006. So what gives? Are future generations illiterate? Is the SAT too hard? Testing, Early Learning, and the Pace of Reform: Talking with Teachers. Our work at the US Department of Education aims to make sure that students throughout this country have the education that they deserve – an education that will give every student a genuine opportunity to join a thriving middle class.
A crucial part of that work is supporting, elevating and strengthening the teaching profession. As often as I can, I spend time talking with teachers about their experience of their work, and of change efforts to improve student outcomes. (We have an important effort, called the RESPECT Project, dedicated to make sure that teacher voices consistently informed policy and program efforts here at the Department of Education.)
Lately, we have begun bringing a video camera to the conversation, and teachers have been generous in letting us capture these conversations so others can see them. Recently, I visited Rogers Heights Elementary School in Bladensburg, Maryland, near Washington, DC. Click here for an alternate version of the video with an accessible player. American Schools Need More Testing, Not Less. Tests Make Kids Smarter. Let's Give Them More. In high school, we used to moan about Mr. Koonz’s chemistry class. Every Friday, Mr. Koonz required his students to turn in a worksheet and take a test. Every single Friday.
We begged for a break from the constant assessments. It turns out Mr. The problem with the standardized tests mandated by No Child Left Behind—as well as with the SAT, A.P., GMAT, MCAT, bar exam, medical boards, and the rest of the standardized tests undergirding the U.S. credentialing system—is that they’re built on what researchers call the “dipstick” view of assessment. Though it doesn’t get a lot of mainstream attention, the research documenting the testing effect goes back nearly 100 years. A young neuroscientist named Andrew Butler has gone further, showing that testing can actually facilitate creative problem solving. Illustration by Raul Urias As for why all of this happens: No one is entirely sure. So why isn’t there much more testing in U.S. schools?
Texas Legislators Seek to Pare Standardized Tests. STAAR writing test a big step backward. The real problem with multiple-choice tests. Is It Time We Threw Standardized Testing Out the Door? When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids - The Answer Sheet. New Reasons to Dislike Multiple-Choice Testing. Why I Changed My Mind. Top authors — including Maya Angelou — urge Obama to curb standardized testing. Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) - Released Assessment Questions. The Test Score Racket. American education and the IQ trap. The First Testing Race to the Top. School district eliminating No Child Left Behind school transfers.
‘Small typo’ casts big doubt on teacher evaluations - Stephanie Simon. Florida to measure student goals by race. Teachers, school district can’t agree, quash Race to the Top... School district needs to spend $12 million on computers for... A ‘value-added’ travesty for an award-winning teacher. Firestorm Erupts Over Virginia's Education Goals. Moco schools chief calls for three-year moratorium on standardized testing. Chicago Students Boycott the NAEP to Demand Safety - Living in Dialogue.
Eighth grader designs standardized test that slams standardized tests. Calling all NYS math teachers: There is an error on the Integrated Algebra Regents exam that the state won't acknowledge. : education. The State of State Standards—and the Common Core—in 2010. Pearson PR Backfires. Education Publisher Accused of Censorship and Propaganda. Minn. one of 3 states where computer glitches derail school tests. How Pearson Cheats on State Tests. Standardized-test robo-graders flunk - Opinion.