Testing and Learning

[groovedaddy]

To get the well-educated, highly skilled workers that the country needs, states must strengthen public school curriculums, especially in math and science. States also need to adopt high-quality tests that show how students are performing from year to year.

Still there is a danger when schools focus too much attention on test preparation at the expense of high-quality classroom instruction. A disturbing new study from an influential research institute at the University of Chicago shows that that is happening far too often in Chicago schools — and likely in many others across the country.

The study, conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, looked at how Chicago high schools dealt with the ACT, the well-known college-entry examination that Illinois students are required to take as a part of the state’s testing regime.

The ACT is a curriculum-based achievement test that measures what students learn at school and how well they are prepared for the first year of college. This is not a test that is easy to game. Performance depends on what students have been taught and the strength of their skills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19thu2.html?th&emc=th

[donco6]

1. The big fight is between . . .

. . . the two types of testing.

One type is described above - the yearly test to measure how an entire group of kids did on a test on one day, which can be compared to the results from the same test on a different group of kids from prior years. Generally, this type of testing leads to hysteria, curriculum-dumping, accusations, condemnation, vouchers, etc. etc. etc.

The other type is the testing that informs instruction for the current group of kids. These are end-of-unit assessments, interim assessments, even simple quizzes or other day-to-day assessments. They help you gauge where the kids are, what they've learned, standards they've mastered, whatever.

There are problems with both. The former provides no info to a teacher on how to help that child. The scores come back far too late to adjust instruction for that group of kids - they've already moved on a grade level. They rarely provide the type of diagnostic analysis needed to inform instruction anyway. All you know is the kids really blew it on this portion. You don't know if it was because they didn't get to that question on the test, the nomenclature was different than they're used to, they stumbled on the reading and therefore couldn't work the problem - all you know is they got it wrong. Further, these type of tests are always viewed with suspicion by teachers because they've been clubbed over the head with the results for so long . . . can anyone blame them?

There problems with the day-to-day assessments are significant as well. You can convince yourself that the kids are really smarter than the assessment shows, and it gets very tempting to justify poor results. We just had a math assessment with many multi-part problems (aligned with the state CSAP, with its multi-part problems). If the student missed one problem, the entire problem was to be counted as incorrect. Many teachers fudged on this and gave the kid 2/3 of the points if they missed only one part. That isn't helpful. They really should have known how to do the entire problem, but by hiding the results, you couldn't identify multi-part problems as something needing work. It's also too easy to ignore the results completely, instead of analyzing them to inform and correct your instruction. No one wants to have to redo lesson plans and reteach something. You get behind your peers and end up looking bad to administration - when really all your doing is meeting the kids' needs. It's a Catch-22 there.

In my opinion, well-done day-to-day assessments, in which teachers are encouraged to identify weaknesses and deal with them individually, are far superior and truly impact learning much more positively than any state- or nationwide test. But we've got to be able to show that we're doing our job - communicating the results to students and parents, using the diagnostic tools available (which really are amazing these days), adjusting instruction and not beating people up when they're learning something new.

The ACT is another thing altogether. It's really just a test that measures college readiness. It's basically an IQ test. They use it because the correlations are high. But that's a really ugly road to go down.

[Smac123]

2. Testing and Learning

It is a good thought for the development.we can parepare the qualified student with the help of weekely test in the schools and colleges for the future.
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smac
http://www.knoxleon.name