Excerpts from this article:
We need to use numbers to evaluate our schools and our students. However, we need to understand what numbers can tell us, and more important, what the numbers can not tell us. Even though many academic measures exist, the errors we make when reading academic measures typically result from just a few incorrect notions. The many misleading conclusions we hear typically result from the same few errors.
…We have looked at just a few examples of how we let numbers mislead us. Typically, the numbers are not wrong; we simply expect the numbers to tell us more than they reasonably can. This usually results from accounting methods that oversimplify information into a single number, while washing out the information we really want to know.
Go to this link for more:
http://conceptualmath.org/philo/weak_acad.htm
Go to this link for part 1 of this series:
http://conceptualmath.org/misc/testshort.htm
Go to this link for part 2 of this series:
http://conceptualmath.org/misc/MAPtest.htm
Go to this link for part 3 of this series:
http://conceptualmath.org/misc/testsupport.htm
Go to this link for part 4 of this series:
http://conceptualmath.org/misc/testadmin.htm
