11–18 of 18 posts
Give the kids 3 standards referenced tests a year; one is referenced to the school district, one to the state, and one to the nation. Give all 3 exams in a week when they do nothing else. This gives us better test results than a single exam on a single day.
Unfortunately gaming the system is still a temptation. By rewarding growth, schools are incentivized to prevent earlier grades from doing too well. One student with potential pushing the overall performance higher than that school might like for that year might be purposefully stunted in order to allow room for growth in later years, robbing them of getting as far in life as they would have.
A simple pencil mark on the door frame usually works best. My adult kids love to look back to see how tall they were when they were 10 years old. Instead of measuring schools how about we pay teachers more and demand decent education. All this measuring! Measuring, measuring, measuring. What a waste of time and money.
> demand decent education Yes, but with 125k schools in the US and 3.5 million teachers, how do you determine which of them are providing a decent education?
Systematically comparing schools on any metric accomplishes nothing. And every year for decades we act like we just need to identify the good schools and replicate their success, with literally actual regard given to what makes schools successful in the first place: functioning administration, involved parents, good and stable teachers. After that, curriculum and resources.
And a functioning administration is generally what gets sacrified first in pursuit of some across the board improvement in some flavor of the week metric.
As a teacher, I agree that we should grade schools on student growth. Give the kids 3 standards referenced tests a year; one is referenced to the school district, one to the state, and one to the nation. Give all 3 exams in a week when they do nothing else. This gives us better test results than a single exam on a single day.
Because the state tests are now optional they are less influential as inputs for future years (almost by definition), and/or alterantive pathways and rubrics must (and are) provided which further dilute their effectiveness.
It's a tricky and complicated situation, and obviously school districts, states and even the federal government are all trying out different ideas.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=valu...
Problem is most states assessments can't measure growth and "growth measures" are numerically nonsense. Growth measures do exist, but they require adaptive tests.
Unfortunately gaming the system is still a temptation. By rewarding growth, schools are incentivized to prevent earlier grades from doing too well. One student with potential pushing the overall performance higher than that school might like for that year might be purposefully stunted in order to allow room for growth in later years, robbing them of getting as far in life as they would have.
Problem is most states assessments can't measure growth and "growth measures" are numerically nonsense. Growth measures do exist, but they require adaptive tests.
Surely growth measures require repeated testing (so one can see how the differences between student at Time A vs. Time B), not necessarily adaptive tests? Maybe I'm missing something; could you help me understand?
However, state tests are annual. You don't want to measure the same thing. If you don't measure the same thing, you can't compare.
There are technically non-adaptive test designs which might work, but it's not what we're using, and they're a lot more complex than adaptive.