standardized test Archive

  • Excerpts from this article: Over the last few years America has invested a great amount of talk into the low quality of education. Most of this talk focuses on teachers. Teacher accountability programs have been mandated by NCLB and created in almost every state. However, as we shall review below, most of the major decisions affecting the quality of education are not made by teachers. …Education is primarily top-down. Politicians and administrators make the decisions about the methods, the curriculum, and the goals. They give teachers mandates. Teachers are frequently not permitted to draw on their training and experience to contribute to the decisions about curriculum, methods, or student needs. …This top-down approach is plagued by fads and constant reform. …NCLB and other reforms place increasing pressure on educators to teach all students the same material – regardless of the...

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 9

    Posted on January 4, 2012 | 1 Comment
    Excerpts from this article: Over the last few years America has invested a great amount of talk into the low quality of education. Most of this talk focuses on teachers. Teacher accountability programs have been mandated by NCLB and created in almost every state. However, as we shall review below, most of the major decisions affecting the quality of education are not made by teachers. …Education is primarily top-down. Politicians and administrators make the decisions about the methods, the curriculum, and the goals. They give teachers mandates. Teachers are frequently not permitted to draw on their training and experience to contribute to the decisions about curriculum, methods, or student needs. …This top-down approach is plagued by fads and constant reform. …NCLB and other reforms place increasing pressure on educators to teach all students the same material – regardless of the...

    Continue Reading...

  • Excerpts from this article: …Schools pay much lip service to student-centered education lately.  However, actions taken by schools and school administrators frequently run contrary to actually supporting student-centered learning.  So, to raise awareness of student-centered education, we provide the assessments of schools and classrooms below.  …Student-centered learning does have risks, but so do the alternatives.  We do not have enough resources to be fully aware of each student’s individual optimums, or to teach each student according to his individual optimum.  Demanding perfect student-centered approaches from teachers will overwhelm them with more work than they can possibly do. …when schools demand curriculum-centered or test-centered learning, teaching tends to focus on the lowest cognitive levels. Students tend to get treated as tests-scores and academic rank, not as individuals. Students tend to gain knowledge without gaining understanding.

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 8

    Posted on December 19, 2011 | No Comments
    Excerpts from this article: …Schools pay much lip service to student-centered education lately.  However, actions taken by schools and school administrators frequently run contrary to actually supporting student-centered learning.  So, to raise awareness of student-centered education, we provide the assessments of schools and classrooms below.  …Student-centered learning does have risks, but so do the alternatives.  We do not have enough resources to be fully aware of each student’s individual optimums, or to teach each student according to his individual optimum.  Demanding perfect student-centered approaches from teachers will overwhelm them with more work than they can possibly do. …when schools demand curriculum-centered or test-centered learning, teaching tends to focus on the lowest cognitive levels. Students tend to get treated as tests-scores and academic rank, not as individuals. Students tend to gain knowledge without gaining understanding.

    Continue Reading...

  • Excerpts from this article: In the first decade of this millennium, we were all impacted and shocked by some serious acts of cheating. However, had we stopped to reason about the situations in question, we might have foreseen the cheating. We might have predicted the cheating from the very motivating factors that brought the cheating about. In this page we will discuss a few famous examples of cheating from this last decade and show how their common elements relate to mathematical reasoning. …Cheating becomes most probable when the incentives are very high and simple, arbitrary, one dimensional definitions of success make cheating very easy. …We have discussed a simple formula to guarantee that cheating will occur. First, create a simple one dimensional definition of success. Second, create strong incentives to achieve that outcome. Third, fail to audit the methods by...

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 7

    Posted on December 5, 2011 | No Comments
    Excerpts from this article: In the first decade of this millennium, we were all impacted and shocked by some serious acts of cheating. However, had we stopped to reason about the situations in question, we might have foreseen the cheating. We might have predicted the cheating from the very motivating factors that brought the cheating about. In this page we will discuss a few famous examples of cheating from this last decade and show how their common elements relate to mathematical reasoning. …Cheating becomes most probable when the incentives are very high and simple, arbitrary, one dimensional definitions of success make cheating very easy. …We have discussed a simple formula to guarantee that cheating will occur. First, create a simple one dimensional definition of success. Second, create strong incentives to achieve that outcome. Third, fail to audit the methods by...

    Continue Reading...

  •  Excerpts from this article:  …Failure to use the correct assessment method, focus, or reporting method will lead to ineffective or counterproductive decisions.  …Rarely is delayed learning the result of failure to learn prerequisite skills. Delayed learning typically results from nonacademic issues, depression, poor eyesight or hearing, lack of study skills, not being familiar with the language or culture of the test, etc. …State Educational Agencies – Can you demonstrate to concerned citizens that your mandated standardized tests serve their intended purpose? Can you verify that the tests both accurately and precisely provide useful data? …Teachers -  Have you been trained to understand the limits to accuracy and precision for the standardized tests you are required to use? Have you observed a mismatch between the test scores and your students’ real performance? …Parents – Your child will be required to take many...

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 6

    Posted on November 24, 2011 | No Comments
     Excerpts from this article:  …Failure to use the correct assessment method, focus, or reporting method will lead to ineffective or counterproductive decisions.  …Rarely is delayed learning the result of failure to learn prerequisite skills. Delayed learning typically results from nonacademic issues, depression, poor eyesight or hearing, lack of study skills, not being familiar with the language or culture of the test, etc. …State Educational Agencies – Can you demonstrate to concerned citizens that your mandated standardized tests serve their intended purpose? Can you verify that the tests both accurately and precisely provide useful data? …Teachers -  Have you been trained to understand the limits to accuracy and precision for the standardized tests you are required to use? Have you observed a mismatch between the test scores and your students’ real performance? …Parents – Your child will be required to take many...

    Continue Reading...

  • 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.

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 5

    Posted on November 9, 2011 | No Comments
    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.

    Continue Reading...

  • Excerpts from this article: …As scores came back from the very first round of testing, teachers noticed that many of the scores did not match what they were observing in their classrooms. …We should have noticed that the RIT scores from the test failed to give us the specific information we needed about each student.  We had strong evidence that the tests were cognitively inaccurate, and numerically unreliable, but we failed act.   As a teaching staff, we were too busy doing the daily things that we had to do. …But teachers reported that the growth graphs did not even come close to matching what they were observing in the classroom. …At the meeting, I again pointed out that our data clearly showed 20% to 50% of the scores being unreliable.  Both the curriculum coordinator and special services coordinator laughed at...

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 4

    Posted on October 25, 2011 | 1 Comment
    Excerpts from this article: …As scores came back from the very first round of testing, teachers noticed that many of the scores did not match what they were observing in their classrooms. …We should have noticed that the RIT scores from the test failed to give us the specific information we needed about each student.  We had strong evidence that the tests were cognitively inaccurate, and numerically unreliable, but we failed act.   As a teaching staff, we were too busy doing the daily things that we had to do. …But teachers reported that the growth graphs did not even come close to matching what they were observing in the classroom. …At the meeting, I again pointed out that our data clearly showed 20% to 50% of the scores being unreliable.  Both the curriculum coordinator and special services coordinator laughed at...

    Continue Reading...

  • Author Karl F. Kuhn explores serious accuracy and precision problems with the MAP test and RIT scores which render the MAP test unreliable for making decisions about students.  The self-adjusting design of the test actually guarantees low precision.  This article provides graphs with mathematical terminology supporting the analysis.  Careful study of his observations may help us understand the limitations of MAP testing.   The standards movement started with good intentions. Business leaders noticed that students were coming out of high schools with a lot of knowledge but no real skills. The graduates could not take on major projects, they could not balance work between independent initiative and cooperation. College professors noticed that students were dependent learners. They failed to ask critical questions. They limited their learning to the course outline, and only learned what was required for the test. Citizens groups noticed that...

    Can We Be Confident In Standardized Test Results? – Part 3

    Posted on October 13, 2011 | 2 Comments
    Author Karl F. Kuhn explores serious accuracy and precision problems with the MAP test and RIT scores which render the MAP test unreliable for making decisions about students.  The self-adjusting design of the test actually guarantees low precision.  This article provides graphs with mathematical terminology supporting the analysis.  Careful study of his observations may help us understand the limitations of MAP testing.   The standards movement started with good intentions. Business leaders noticed that students were coming out of high schools with a lot of knowledge but no real skills. The graduates could not take on major projects, they could not balance work between independent initiative and cooperation. College professors noticed that students were dependent learners. They failed to ask critical questions. They limited their learning to the course outline, and only learned what was required for the test. Citizens groups noticed that...

    Continue Reading...