Welcome back to the weekly testing roundup! For those of you who commented on the previous weeks’ post to ask, “What’s a psychometrician?,” the New York Times has probably the best article about the field to date. I don’t usually think of myself as “obscure, esoteric, and cerebral,” but there you go.
On to the testing news for the week…
The Washington Post asks, “Do grades or test scores make the student?” Actually, it’s a parent of a bright kid with high test scores and low grades who is asking the question. What do you think of her argument?
Apparently, the new phrase for “high-stakes tests” is “tests of stress.” Who knew? The headline writer was obviously looking for something catchy, but what came out was something goofy, alarmist, and inaccurate.
Australia’s first round of reading and math (or in Aussie terms, literacy and numeracy) tests are set to begin – but so is a Victoria teacher’s strike. The teachers want higher pay, and they seem prepared to disrupt the testing in order to get it. Frankly, national high-stakes tests are so visible and crucial that I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this in the US.
A Philadelphia parent is proud of his local school’s test scores.
Most people with some knowledge about how test items are written are aware that exam reading passages are often vetted for potentially controversial or inflammatory statements, in order to avoid distracting the test-takers or causing an emotional reaction that could interfere with their ability to answer the item. Unfortunately for test developers, there’s no telling what some people will find controversial. One thing that might soothe the author’s concern – this is a practice item, and many practice items are older items that are not in current use, or alternate items that will never be in live use on the exam. The purpose of practice items is to provide a general feel for the content and timing of the exam. Hence, the fact that a creationism argument shows up in a practice item is not an indication that it will be on the actual MCAT, and in fact that topic is probably extremely unlikely to be on the live exam.
Fourth-graders in some Toronto Catholic schools will take standardized tests on religious knowledge this year. Key quote from the trustees: “A standardized test shows that we are not only in the business of core education and faith formation but about religious instruction…Knowledge instruction creates better formed and knowledgeable Catholics by laying a foundation that can ultimately be measured.”
Dr. Patricia Deubel writes about the difference between accountability and “teaching to the test.” She notes that standardized tests are useful – and the high stakes associated with them can be as well – but theorizes that some methods of preparing for the tests are better than others.
And finally, devoted parent, school board member, and rabbit Kevin wins the battle against a single standardized test – but loses the war. Love the strip about which board member changed his vote in support.
“Do grade or test scores make the student?”
From moron to MENSA the public school classroom accomodates students who don’t do what the course standards require. On the low end, a teacher can’t discover what a struggling student needs help with if the student refuses to do any work. On the high end, diplomas and professional credentials are not awarded for potential…there must be a demonstrated level of performance.
The parent(s) of the bright kid might do well to emphasize self-discipline and a get-the-job-done-regardless-of-how-you-feel-about-it attitude in the the kid. Nobody’s going to reward you for something you are going to do, nor for being as smart as your momma says you are.
As a teacher, I’ll take a room full of motivated dullards over the recalcitrant genius any day.
Kimberly,
If you were to address the faculty at my high school, and tell them the good and the bad, the strengths and the limitations of standardized testing, you’d still have a bunch of people for whom standardized tests are the secular equivalent of the antichrist.
Even though I’m a parent of a kid with highish test scores and not so stellar grades, I have little sympathy for the Washington Post parent. If her son’s college applications showed the same entitled, I’m-too-good-for-this attitude she showed in her letter, I’m not surprised he was rejected.
It might have been better for her to have homeschooled her son, but she didn’t. The colleges evaluate what actually happened– which is that the student refused to do his homework.
The mother seems to make a habit of soliciting advice from others, and then ignoring it. Neither the expert in gifted education, nor the high school counselors advised her to steer the course she ultimately chose, that is, to leave her child in the public schools, but encourage him to ignore course requirements.
This is a trap really smart students are prone to fall into. You can coast along on your native intelligence, doing well on tests, while ignoring the homework everyone else needs. However, at some point, the work does become more difficult, and woe betide the student who has neglected to learn how to study along the way.
I felt the need to comment on the article on the “gifted” student, but everyone else has already stolen my thunder.
On the “teaching to the test” piece, the fact that its possible to teach to the test is a failure of the testmaker, not the teacher. I have to teach to the test to a certain extent simply because the test requires a reading level that is higher than the grade in which the students usually take it… and it’s an even bigger problem since I teach at a school where the average student is 3-4 grades below reading level. Much of my time is spent covering reading comprehension and test-taking strategies – things that should have been taught years before.
On the comic strips… as a biology geek I appreciated the “amphibian” comment in the second one.
I noticed your post from last year about why teachers quit, and it struck a chord with me. As an elementary school teacher for the past 8 years, I was particularly saddened when I watched one young, energetic, motivated and talented teacher leave the profession for good. No matter how much I mentored her, her model for teaching was not sustainable. The community was devasted to see her go. Then I started researching teacher attrition and conducting interviews with people I knew who left the profession or who were thinking strongly of doing so. Most of the time it is the academics, poiticians and others who are removed from teaching that write books and make comments about teacher attrition. I wanted to get the voices of teachers who are leaving, the ones you cited in your post and thousands of others, who have their own reasons for leaving the classroom. I am writing Why Great Teachers Quit, an in the trenches, real life view of teachers describing their reasons for quitting, along with creative suggestions for ways to change and improve.
I need to hear from teachers from all over the country about why they are leaving teaching (or thinkging about it). Please visit http://whygreatteachersquit.wordpress.com to answer survey questions, or to write a more open ended response. You will see two posts with more details about the project. Please be sure to include the grade level, geographic region (general), and subject that you teach in your comments.
I hope your readers will stop by and share their perspectives. We can only make change by telling people how it really is, and what we can to do help teachers stay where we need them most.
I have a daughter who is profoundly gifted and very driven, and we ended up homeschooling her, but we wouldn’t let her drop out of high school until she mastered the process. She was getting a D- in a math class at the end of the first month, which was absurd, and I insisted that she figure out how to do the work required in the least amount of time and effort. After about 6 weeks she got to the point that she finished all of her homework in less than 1.5 hours a night (5 nights a week), and got her grades up to A’s and A+’s, and then we let her quit. I did pretty much the same thing in high school. I was taking AP Chemistry as a junior (and physics and calculus, but I kind of liked physics and I already knew calculus so read during that class), and it was really boring, so I finished all of the work for the year in the first month, turned in my lab books, and was done. I dropped out of school a couple of weeks later to go to college, but one of the reasons I got in early was that it was clear that I would finish things I started…
I’m sorry about the trouble her kid is having, but every job I’ve ever held has a certain amount of crap associated with it, and working with people that are “too good” to do their share of the crap is infuriating, and I veto anyone that even smells faintly of that attitude.
I had a similar experience in high school: Grades are generally a measure of sycophancy while test scores measure knowledge.
While I dropped out of high school, I did have near-perfect test score and did some outside work that got recognized. Interestingly, while the larger state schools I applied to rejected me for not graduating high-school, two Ivies were happy to accept me based on my other work.
(And I’ve been happy to pay back the favor: I did well in business afterwards and I’m sure I’ll end up giving them over a million dollars before I’m 30…)
Still, how I wish I had just been homeschooled. Putting a smart kid in a public school should be a crime.
“On the “teaching to the test†piece, the fact that its possible to teach to the test is a failure of the testmaker, not the teacher. I have to teach to the test to a certain extent simply because the test requires a reading level that is higher than the grade in which the students usually take it…” If that’s true, it’s definitely a problem with the test – although I wonder how you know that it’s you and not the test-writers that are correct about the reading level for this grade.
However, there are also teachers who try to teach specific items that will be on the test because they are so intellectually lacking that they can’t imagine that the best way to do well on a test is simply to learn the subject.
I don’t have much sympathy for the mom of the gifted kid. Either you teach your gifted kid that he has to jump through the public school hoops whether it’s idiotic or not, or you provide him with an alternative education that better suits him, whether that be private or home school.
Both my husband and I are gifted, yet we both managed to get 4.0 averages in high school. Were we often bored out of our skulls? Absolutely. Was it usually a waste of our time? Definitely. Is the real world going to arrange itself to best suit our needs? Not a chance. Our parents expected us to perform to the best of our abilities, whether we wanted to or not. They instilled us with a solid work ethic that has carried us through a lot of inanity.
People who give their students (gifted or otherwise) a sense of entitlement are doing them a major disservice. I attended college with students like this. As business majors, we had to take a very basic introduction to computer course. At the time, there was no “test out” option. Students constantly complained about how easy it was, yet earned C’s because they ignored the homework and passed the tests. My husband and I earned A’s. Yes, the homework was pointless for us, but those 15 minutes a day were worth it for the grade. We both understood that sometimes you’ve got to play the game to get by.
We plan to home school our children for myriad reasons. One of these reasons is that we want to provide our children with the challenging, personalized education for which we yearned. I don’t think that the public school system is going to have a major overhaul anytime soon that would make this kind of education possible. The inherent flaw with public or private school is that you will never have a perfectly homogeneous class, and thus will never be teaching for one individual’s needs. I teach at a small private school (8-17 students per class), and even then I have to teach to the middle ground! Yes, I have students who are sometimes bored. But I also have others who are always lost. I try to add advanced content of interest or work on remediation as well, but with 50 min. a day I know that not every student’s needs are being met as well as they would be if I could tutor one on one. The perfectionist in me aches that I can’t do this for every child, but both outlier groups have to learn to function and cope within the limitations of the system, or find an alternative that better meets their needs. This year of teaching has reinforced our decision to home school our children.
Grades are both a joke and a fraud. I don’t like homeschooling, but when you consider the impact that grades have on a kid’s ability to get to college, it might be a better idea.
The best solution is to remove teacher assessment from the grade, and make it a test-based grade.