81–90 of 140 posts
In the broader context, when it comes to math, reading and science, teens in the U.S. rank 36th in the world. Students in Shanghai are rated the best. What are they doing right that we could be doing better here in the US? http://cnycentral.com/news/local/new-survey-ranks-us-student...
I tutor my little brother-in-law sometimes (he's 9), and I like to deprogram him from public school testing culture as much as possible. I tell him that when he's with me and he doesn't know the answer, don't guess. Just say, "I don't know." And I test him, too. I ask him questions he can't possibly know the answer to, or questions that have no right answer, just to hear him say, "I don't know." And then I congratula…
(Imagine a test of 10 questions, each substantially harder; one student manages to answer correctly up to question 5 before starting to feel uncertain and refusing to answer any more, and a second gets up to question 6. How sure are you that #1 knows less than #2? Now imagine that they instead 'guessed' on the remaining 5 questions, and #1 got 3/5 right and #2 got 1/4. Now how sure are you? Haven't you learned something from this apparently 'useless' guessing?)
> But in the real world, there is no 25% credit for guessing.
You can no more refuse to guess in the real world than you can refuse to make choices, take actions, or let time pass.
The fallacy with using tests of the kids as a marker for the quality of the teachers is that you just can't do that and get reliable results. A bunch of black kids from the ghettos, who have their parents in jail/dead, worrying about siblings etc. and no cash to spend on basic school equipment, much less a decent meal every day, will have vastly lower scores than a bunch of white kids with helicopter parents. If scho…
Which is not what is being proposed by people arguing for teacher evaluations drawing on standardized testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling), as the very name 'value-added' implies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the people who don't need to realize that a 20% discount on $37.50 is $30, why bother sending them to school past 6th grade at all? Now that I see your argument more fully, it seems less like an argument against testing and more like an argument against wasting resources on unneeded education. Do you believe the people who don't need the specific topics you mention actually do need education beyond grade 6? If so…
> For the people who don't need to realize that a 20% discount on $37.50 is $30, why bother sending them to school past 6th grade at all? Now that I see your argument more fully, it seems less like an argument against testing and more like an argument against wasting resources on unneeded education. Do you believe the people who don't need the specific topics you mention actually do need education beyond grade 6? If…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on the content of the tests. You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?" If no, then it's fair to criticize them for having to spend time teaching this, and instead achieve a lower proficiency but teach a broader skill set. But if yes, then any criticism of "teaching for the test" falls flat: this is stuff students need to be able to…
"Teaching to the test" generally doesn't mean covering the material that the test is intended to cover in theory, it means drilling the exact format of questions, studying previous years, knowing exactly what you can sacrifice coverage of, how to guess multiple choice questions when you don't know the answer etc. Basically over-optimizing to fit an imperfect model. Now, I'm a good test taker generally, and it has alw…
- As I said above, you would need to cite which test question are game-able, and which encourage this narrow teaching, which critics never do.
- If the problem is that teachers try to satisfy this goal by trying to game the tests, then the problem is with this way of teaching, not the tests per se.
In the broader context, when it comes to math, reading and science, teens in the U.S. rank 36th in the world. Students in Shanghai are rated the best. What are they doing right that we could be doing better here in the US? http://cnycentral.com/news/local/new-survey-ranks-us-student...
The elephant in the room is poverty: that's well known to have massive educational drawbacks and most of the countries which outperform the United States have much higher social safety nets. It's hard to study when you have untreated medical problems, are hungry or perhaps not sleeping in the same place every night or even having a safe place to sleep at all. That's a familiar litany to many U.S. public school teachers and it's something which, unlike standardized testing, has been the subject of ongoing cuts for decades.
I think that this is something we should address for many reasons but I do want to note that poverty doesn't directly explain the entire gap, although I suspect that the problem is exacerbated by the social instability caused by multi-generational poverty which is harder to directly account for:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/201...
“Even the OECD authors of the PISA test acknowledge that PISA results are due to a combination of variables, including but not limited to schooling, life experiences/home environment, poverty, access to early childhood programs, and health. In 2013, the OECD wrote in one of their reports that poverty explains up to 46% of the PISA mathematics score in OECD countries. At no time did OECD claim, as Duncan stated, schools' performance on the test can be blamed on low expectations and complacency.”
“If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.”I tutor my little brother-in-law sometimes (he's 9), and I like to deprogram him from public school testing culture as much as possible. I tell him that when he's with me and he doesn't know the answer, don't guess. Just say, "I don't know." And I test him, too. I ask him questions he can't possibly know the answer to, or questions that have no right answer, just to hear him say, "I don't know." And then I congratula…
A student guess is an opportunity for you to learn what they understand and what they still need help with. If a student makes an attempt on a well-written multiple choice test, the attempt can show the teacher exactly what the student does and doesn't understand.
The right approach to guessing can communicate a lot, and partial credit may be justified if, for example, the student correctly factors a quadratic equation but fails to remember how to compute the intercepts from the result. That would tell a teacher that the student remembers part of the lesson but needs help with the rest.
I tutor my little brother-in-law sometimes (he's 9), and I like to deprogram him from public school testing culture as much as possible. I tell him that when he's with me and he doesn't know the answer, don't guess. Just say, "I don't know." And I test him, too. I ask him questions he can't possibly know the answer to, or questions that have no right answer, just to hear him say, "I don't know." And then I congratula…
23 hours a year is "overwhelming"? That's 40 minutes/week, assuming a 36 week school year. In other news, I'm overwhelmed by brushing my teeth. Incidentally, since I'm sure a bunch of people will spout the "teaching to the test" slogan, I'd love it if someone could look at these real tests and explain how to teach to them without improving student learning. Somehow I suspect not, because real tests are actually reaso…
I'm certain it's being taken too far without caring about the consequences (which we could point out as another example of how dysfunctional our public schools have become, see above, in the latter half of the 20th Century they simply didn't care if their graduates could read), but graduating from high school in 1979 I was at the edge of the beginning of this in Missouri. And the test was simple (well, after the SATs and College Board achievement tests :-) and covered entirely relevant stuff, things you really should be able to do to earn a high school diploma.
This in fact has a lot to do with out current insane college finance regime; the high school diploma became an entirely worthless signal, so when combined with Griggs v. Duke Power, the non-free for the student college degree has become the new signal of minimum competence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here are some real standardized tests. Which students don't need to be able to answer "Roberto paid $43.08 for 3 CDs. All 3 CDs were the same price. How much did each CD cost?" Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)? http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Mathematics/20100505book1... http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/04261...…
> Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed? I think you've somewhat missed the point, though I'm happy enough to play that game. My question would be which adults need to know those things? You ask me, "Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)?" And I would be inclined to answer anyone who doesn't want to go into…