Veteran educator Ann Cronin offers her plan to assess real student achievement.
Skip the standardized tests and assess what students know and can do.
She shows how it can be done, saving every state and district millions now wasted on the testing industry.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The keys, here, are the terms “demonstrate” and “apply.”
We need to substitute for these one-size-fits-all high-stakes standardized exams acceptance of extremely varied tangible student PRODUCTS, to be evaluated by local teachers, that require application of descriptive knowledge and procedural knowledge.
In other words, we need to substitute a portfolio system, and acceptable portfolio work needs to be as varied as our economy is.
It’s insane to want students to be identically milled. We need cosmologists AND cosmeticians.
There’s an old saying in the software industry: “I don’t give a _____ what your grades or degrees are. I care whether you can write the code.”
Well, we need to start caring whether the kid can a) write the code, b) build the website from scratch with HTML, c) make the film, d) write the academic paper in proper MLA or AP style, e) replace the engine, f) cut the hair in a particular style, g) complete the reading list on _____, h) create the business plan with spreadsheets showing income statements and balance sheets and cash flows–extraordinarily varied but substantial work world and procedural knowledge.
i) paint the portrait, j) perform the dance, k) compose the sheet music for the piece for tuba and glockenspiel, l) write the proposal for the new town ordinance, m) do the layout for the public service ad campaign, . . . .
It doesn’t sound like these teachers were implementing a portfolio system. The article talks about reactions after administering midterm/term exams. I would love to see an example of such an exam. Actually I would love her to write a book describing the assessment model.
Performance based evaluation is an excellent way to assess diverse students. Students have the opportunity to show what know or demonstrate how they solved a problem. We routinely used performance assessment for content subjects in our elementary school. Unlike bubble tests that result in convergent thinking, performance assessments give students a broader range of options to demonstrate understanding and/or mastery.
Standardized testing undermines real in depth cognitive learning. As a result many our students flounder on tasks in which they must read, research, write and think. A lot less reading, writing and thinking is demanded of students today in high school and college. Relying on computers to assess students has resulted in more behaviorism and less thought. In my senior year of high school I had to do a large research project with footnotes and a bibliography. It was a massive project, especially using a typewriter, not a computer, and I am not the greatest typist. In college I had to write many papers for humanities and social science courses.
My own children often took on-line assessments which sometimes required them to write a paragraph or two. My daughter had a couple of papers or essays to write in college. The only writing I can remember my son doing in college was in his freshman composition course. After his freshman year all of his assessments were on-line. An over reliance on technology is producing students that do not fully develop their expressive expertise in reading and writing.
But even with performance-based assessment, one runs into issues. So one must be very, very careful about creating universal guidelines for these. Let me give you an example. You are perhaps familiar with e.e. cummings’s scatter poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.” I was judging a speech competition, years ago, and one girl performed this using Ella Fitzgerald-style scat singing. I recognized immediately what she was doing, and I thought the performance brilliant. A perfect wedding of content and style, and beautifully executed. I gave her a perfect score. All the other judges gave her the lowest possible score. They had no clue what they had just seen.
Don’t give a damn about “student achievement” and never did as a teacher.
I wanted the students to learn as much as possible that they chose to learn, whether they could “demonstrate” it or not. Many times students are reluctant (and many times are quite happy to) to show what they know. These “reluctant” students go along learning a lot more than they demonstrate to others. I’ve seen it many times.
Ah, but you might say the proof is in the pudding. Well these students don’t want pudding, they want a piece of pie that they have baked using their own recipe and methods.
Well said!
Dwayne, if I think that I’ve taught a student HTML and he or she can’t use that to create a basic website, then I have not taught that student HTML. If I think that I have taught a guitar student chord families, and he or she cannot work out the chords to a popular song, then I have not taught that student chord families. If I think that I have taught a student MLA documentation style, and he or she cannot create a Works Cited page in proper form, then I have not taught that student MLA documentation style. If I think that I’ve taught a student basic conversational Spanish, and he or she can’t greet a friend and chat about what’s happening in his or her life, then I have not taught that student basic conversational Spanish. I have not done my job. Yes, there are LOTS of issues with measurement, but it simply is not the case that measurement cannot occur and is completely useless. If I have a new guitar student, there are things I need to know about what he or she knows and can do before I can figure out what I need to teach to move that student forward. This diagnostic use of measurement (“Play me a major scale in first position in the key of C”) tells me what and how I can teach. Only if the student knows what a scale is can I say, “OK, chords are built as triads on this scale. The first is the tonic. The fourth is the subdominant. The fifth is the dominant. The sixth is the relative minor.” If the student doesn’t know what a scale is, I can try to teach chord families by some other means, or I can go back and fill in what he or she doesn’t know. Diagnosis is a key and legitimate use of assessment. So is formative assessment–checking out what that kid is learning and using the assessment itself as an instructional tool (“OK. Let’s take a song you can’t play yet–‘Wake Me up When September Ends.’ Work out the chords for me in the key of D. Go.”)
Yes, I can teach a student basic guitar without ANY theory. But I need to know what he or she knows and can do already before I can decide how I need to approach teaching him or. If the student knows some very elementary theory, the job will be a LOT easier.
That said, yes, it is important to deal compassionately with students who are reluctant to demonstrate what they know and can do.
“Yes, there are LOTS of issues with measurement, but it simply is not the case that measurement cannot occur and is completely useless.”
Yes “it simply IS the case that measurement cannot occur and is completely useless.”
In the teaching and learning process there are assessments, judgments, evaluations, etc. . . but there is no measuring. . . at all. I know you have read this before from me. Please refute or rebut what you believe to be any fallacies in my argument:
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
I grew up in a time where essays were a standard way of demonstrating knowledge. Some teachers were better than others at posing questions that asked us to do more than regurgitate our notes, but I do remember enjoying studying for history finals in particular because, in the process of review, I began to synthesize the material into a coherent scheme. The only exam i took in high school that did not have an essay component was math. I don’t know how the teachers read all those exams although I think the more valuable piece was actually solely for me. The thinking I did in deciding what to write and how to write it after spending hours on review was a valuable experience in itself without any grade being applied to it although I di eagerly await that seal of approval. I know I didn’t appreciate what I was gaining through that forced review in studying for the test. Of course, there was the reality that I did not retain all that material for very long although as I went on through college and graduate school I certainly gained in the way I thought about what I was learning.
Dwayne: I am going to try to adjust, not rebut, your thesis. I agree that we cannot “measure” learning. But we can easily count the number of correct responses to basic questions. Something is learned about a person’s general knowledge of a topic by asking questions which have clear answers. Counting the number of correct responses to questions is a legitimate way to see if the student has basic knowledge of a topic. Counting correct responses to basic questions is a legitimate way to evaluate whether a student has basic understanding of a topic. Counting population “measures” the population in a way. Some things can be counted. We can count the number of tasks a student completes to the satisfaction of the instructor. We can count the number of satisfactory products a student gives us in class. I agree that this is not a measurement, not even in the sense that counting population is a measurement. But it is an essential aspect of evaluation.
This idea is sort of the basis for understanding the difference between reliable authority and a demagogue. The former will argue using he facts, the latter using simplistic appeals to stereotypes and emotions. An essay that discusses the French Revolution without talking about Jacobins and Robespierre in particular is probably vacuous. If you have an argument based on proximate comparison, as you point out above, or if the argument is based on false assumptions altogether, we can spot it as problematic.
You know me well enough to know that the process of standardized testing is as odious to me as anything could possibly be, but we need assessment, or children will often opt out of the performance of duty.
It messes with little minds to learn from Benoit Mandelbrot that you can’t measure a coastline except within the limitations of your measuring tools. But, you know, that’s the way the world is.
Well said, Roy.
However, I don’t think that we need the assessment to drive performance. This is a mistake. In fact, all the recent study shows that extrinsic punishments and rewards are actually DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhSOAtAyQ
Something else the Deformers don’t understand. They think that everyone else is motivated by what they are motivated by–by the external reward$$$$$.
And don’t equate assessment with tests.
Dwayne, Roy, I can disagree with you on minor points and still recognize my true brothers.
Fascinating video. I always get interesting stuff from you folks. I am not sure the research says anything about students. The reason I say this is that students are required to go to school, many of them against their desires. Far too many students are out to just get the minimum done. They will tell you without hesitation, just tell me what the minimum is.
So I have taken to doing something that actually fits in pretty well with the research described on the video. Classes have tasks that have to be completed in one or two periods. There is a product they have to complete. If they do, the get what I call a wage grade. This means that I do not parse the difference between one paper and another, if you do it, you get 100 percent of the credit. If you do not, you get no wages. No points are given until a comparable task is completed (as in when a student is off somewhere besides school.
The way this calls to mind the research on the video is that the really proficient students find joy in doing the task well, be it coloring and labeling a map or writing a paragraph.
You may have noticed that I just presented an argument against myself. O well. Time to quit.
The paradox is partially explained by the notion that providing an extrinsic reward sends a message: this is not important or interesting enough for you to do it without my rewarding or threatening you to get you to do it. People care A LOT about personal autonomy–about being self directed and self motivated. Another thing that the Deformers don’t get and don’t want to get. The guy who used stack ranking at Microsoft, basically ruling through fear, isn’t going to understand people’s need for personal autonomy. He wants them to shut up and do as they are told or else.
I don’t quite understand why the Skinnerian type behavior control crap came back in. My psychology major thoroughly embraced the behaviorist mantra, but we were describing the behavior of rats. Even then, the limitations of the theory were recognized. Children were not rats pushing a button for treats.
Such an important point, speduktr! That Behaviorist crap is the modus operandi of the standards and testing and the basis for the current generation of depersonalized education software. It’s as if the Education Deformers had decided to base their reforms on phrenology.
“Dwayne, Roy, I can disagree with you on minor points and still recognize my true brothers.”
Concur with the thought!
Duane.
Roy,
Please reread what I have written as your adjustment is what I’ve stated: that there are assessments, evaluations and judgments (A,E,J) involved in the teaching and learning process.
At the same time, one of my concerns is that that process of A,E,J does not focus on what I consider to be the primary concern of the teaching and learning process which is we ought to be helping the students “learn how to learn” and what it takes for them as individuals to learn. Unfortunately, it seems that the A,E,J process the majority of the time is used as a pronouncement on the student, that it is done outside of the student’s learning process and does not in hardly any fashion serve the primary concern of helping students to learn. It is an external process imposed upon the student instead of an assessment, test or quiz, or project or performance being “of and in” the student. Standardized tests are especially egregious in this aspect as the student never gets to see what they got right and wrong-they only get a truncated score that has no validity whatsoever and little to no meaning for the student in their learning process.
Counting correct answers definitely falls into the latter extrinsic assessment. Who cares if someone gets 7/10 correct. Means little. What matters is which ones were gotten right and why the student got them right (could have been a lucky guess which really doesn’t show much “learning”) and which ones the student got wrong and why they were wrong (could have been they mismarked the answer). The key being to use the results, the actual test, quiz, assessment in review of the answers to help the student learn in a better fashion. It should not be a pronunciation of 4 out of 10 correct and be left at that.
Finally (and Bob thinks he has long answers-LOL!) in regards to “children will often opt out of the performance of duty.” Why is that? I’d lay money on the fact that it is usually due to assessments being used as a pronouncement on the students and not as a device/activity to help the students learn how to learn.
If life were like school, then it would be the dystopian nightmare of the Black Mirror episode about social rating called “Nosedive.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Does that make school pretty dystopian? Yes. It does.
From the wiki article:
“”Nosedive” was mostly well-received by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the episode has a score of 95% based on 20 reviews, with an average score of 7.33.[42] The episode garnered four-star ratings in The Independent and The Guardian,[43][7] along with an A− rating in The A.V. Club.[44] In The Mancunion, the episode received 3.5 stars;[45] it was rated three stars by The Telegraph and the Irish Independent.[8][46] Emefa Setranah of The Mancunion writes that the episode lives up to the show’s reputation,[45] and The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee says the episode feels fresh despite covering technology similarly to prior episodes”
Ah, the supreme irony of those ratings/evaluations/assessments, eh!
That definition of assessment really is only a word substitution. As a special education teacher my assessments of students, no matter what form they took: test, exercise, essay, project, presentation, or observation was to inform my instruction as well as the student’s understanding. It was not simply a substitute word for ranking and rating. I was trying to understand how to best support the student and to help that student figure out how best to get where they needed to go. Assessment was never viewed as a “measure” of learning.
Duane: sorry it took so long to respond. I think you suggested that I needed to re-read what you wrote. What I really needed to do was to re-write what I wrote. It was intended as a sort of clarification of your points with a redirection toward the practical application of how we can evaluate without damning students. I would concur that students I perceive as lazy or trying to avoid work are actually tired of being stacked at the bottom of the Yurtle stack in academic society.
Let’s talk for a bit about pie making. In particular, making a standard pastry pie crust:
There are four essential pieces of knowledge that you need to have, and these kinds of knowledge are of two kinds–descriptive and procedural.
Descriptive:
You need to know what the ingredients are: flour, butter, water, salt
You need to know that all the ingredients except the salt must be chilled
Procedural:
You need to know that the ingredients must be BARELY combined (and the procedure for doing this), and you need to know that they must be combined QUICKLY. Work the dough more than is needed simply to bring it together, and you will end up melting the fat and causing the pie crust to be tough.
You need to know that the dough needs to be formed into a ball and rested in the fridge.
If kids know this stuff, they can make a great pie crust. It’s pretty easy to learn. And once they know the basics here, they can do all kinds of creative variations.
One should talk in terms of descriptive and procedural knowledge. Talk of pie-making “skills” is vague and dumb. Pie making cannot be learned by simply practicing one’s “skills” over and over. Descriptive and procedural knowledge are essential. And because both are concrete–are news you can use–they can be easily tested, unlike extraordinarily vague, abstract “skills” like, say, “inferencing” or “finding the main idea,” which lump together shoelaces and football teams and theories in metaphysics–all this disparate stuff, treating it as though it were some single thing–a combination of two kinds of logical fallacy, reification and the category error. Unfortunately, this fallacy is the worm at the core of a lot of curricula and pedagogy these days.
Interesting that you bring up pie making. Have been savoring a peach pie for a couple of days now but been too lazy to get off my butt and make one.
Standard pie crust???
No such thing.
Standard procedure???
No such thing.
Each pie crust recipe has it’s own hazards, pitfalls and techniques of making/handling.
I come from a pie making family (on my mom’s side) No one ever made a better cherry pie than my Aunt Helen, never. Fresh cherries from their cherry tree. A lard based crust, which many proclaim is the only fat to use (and many an empanada crust maker would agree). I had my mom make me a peach pie for my birthday instead of a cake when I was a kid. But she used Crisco instead of lard, she swore by it-no other shortening would do. I’ve made many many pies over the years, the first being a lemon merengue totally from scratch when I was ten years old. We used to make empanadas (a form of pie) in Spanish class. I’m no stranger to pie and quiche making. (Remember, Real Men Make Quiche)
And you know, each pie crust (and pie) is different (well except for those horrendous store standardized pies) just like all students and all classroom teaching and learning environments are different. While there is true measurement involved in making a pie crust there is no true measurement involved in the teaching and learning process.
OK, I’m inspired now, Dwayne. Time to make some peach cobbler!
I agree, ofc, Dwayne, that each pie crust is different. And even with physical quantities, exact measurement is LITERALLY impossible due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But this does not mean that one cannot a) put forward sound notions regarding essential descriptive and procedural knowledge involved in making pastry pie crusts (or writing a fable or scanning the meter of a line of poetry) and cannot b) assess learning of that knowledge. And calling such assessment, which is certainly doable and defensible, “measurement” is simply a matter of arbitrary semantics. You can call it “boogoogoogoo” if you want. All this talk about measurement in general being impossible except for physical quantities (which is wrong, because exact measurement isn’t possible there either) is a DISTRACTION from the essential issues–from the facts that the ELA tests now being used are invalid; that they cannot be made valid given the vague, abstract “standards”that they supposedly measure; that these tests press into service question formats that are entirely inappropriate to what they are attempting to assess; that the tests don’t assess what they purport to assess; that there are useful varieties of assessment (diagnostic and formative), of which the high-stakes standardized tests are NOT examples; that the tests have not achieved their objectives (improving outcomes and reducing achievement gaps); and so on.
““measurement” is simply a matter of arbitrary semantics.”
No, it’s not a matter of “arbitrary semantics”. The term is consciously and deliberately used to give a sheen of respectability to a process that does not deserve that respectability. It is a term used to fool people into thinking that a pseudo-scientific method is actually a scientific method, an objective one, which it is not. Because many may not, probably don’t recognize that fact does not counter that fact in any way.
yes, it is all that
“All this talk about measurement in general being impossible except for physical quantities (which is wrong, because exact measurement isn’t possible there either) is a DISTRACTION from the essential issues. . . ”
What is an “exact measurement”? You’re bringing in a straw man and also putting words in my mouth as my concern has never been with an “exact measurement”. That is a different concept/problem than whether an actual measurement takes place.
We differ on what we consider “essential issues”. I don’t know how much more “essential” focusing on validity and as Wilson puts it invalidity any other issue can be. Everything else is secondary or tertiary, certainly not primary.
I concur with your statements of why you consider the ELA tests (and the standards upon which they are built) to be very important considerations, but again those play second fiddle to the first violin of validity/invalidity concerns as once something has been proven, and I’ve not seen any cogent rebuttal/refutation of Wilson’s work in over twenty years of looking, begging, pleading. . . absolutely none.
BILLIONS now wasted on the high-stakes standardized testing industry
The cost of the tests themselves, according to a new report from the Brown Center on Education Policy, is 1.7 billion a year JUST FOR THE STATE CONTRACTS.
This doesn’t include the billions spent on computers for students to take the tests on; database systems for storing and analyzing and reporting on scores; pretests and benchmark tests in imitation of the state tests; test prep materials; coaching for the tests; curricula that have been distorted dramatically in imitation of the tests; the large portion of facilities and salaries now devoted, in schools, to test prep and test administration and proctoring; communication with parents and students about the tests; etc.
BILLIONS WASTED EVERY YEAR by an unfunded federal mandate that a) has not improved outcomes and b) has not closed achievement gaps.
High-stakes standardized testing is a cancer that crowds out and replaces health tissue and consumes necessary resources. Cut it out.
and a mandate which no one seems to be speaking about removing
“Diagnosis is a key and legitimate use of assessment.”
If you call it assessment, you’re fine. Forget the term measurement. There is no standard measure of learning. You can assess a student’s learning according to your professional judgement, but as you noted yourself, you rated a student’s performance highly where the other judges missed the excellence altogether. None of you were applying a standard measure, or everyone’s rating would nave been identical or very close to the same. If I measure a board using a standard procedure, my measurement is going to be the same as everyone else’s who knows how to use a tape measure. Different animals.
Some things can be measured by standard measures; many things cannot. It’s important to know the difference. We are entirely agreed about that.
Yes, I know we are in total agreement. I was trying to save Duane some work.
Good idea.
Use a tape measure to measure students.
By the way.
I did just that when I taught geometry.
For a lesson on the golden ratio,i had students measure the distance from their belly button to the floor and divide that by the distance from belly button to the top of the head.
For the girls in a class, the average proportion came out surprisingly close to the golden ratio.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But the golden ratio actually shows up in nature is places where it is actually not coincidence, but the result of an evolutionary “optimization”.
I vaguely remember participating in a math fun day, or maybe I am just remembering the math part of a fun “project type” day from years ago when I was subbing. The teachers had put together some cool activities on the Golden Ratio and, I believe, Fibonacci numbers. I was fascinated.
SDP: I had a friend many years ago who made his living making a thing called a hammered dulcimer. Tim was one in a great many instrument makers, and he decided to get a teaching degree to supplement his income. Taking one of those elementary education classes in math and methods, he was told of the golden ratio and Fibinocci Sequence and all that. He told me he went home and measured certain dimensions on the instrument he had used to produce what was his best sound. You guessed it, their ratio was the golden ratio.
Roy
I think I enjoyed teaching about the golden ratio as much as the students enjoyed learning about it.
It is fascinating how often the Fibonacci numbers and golden ratio turn up in nature.
There is a certain amount of mythology (and exaggeration) related to the golden ratio, but there is also a lot of legitimate science.!
One of my favorite topics in geometry was teaching the variety of places where the geometric mean showed up as a design aspect of the placement of various geometric figures, and how often these were essential to mechanical applications.
The testing companies (and educational publishers that produce standardized tests) have been running this scam for far too long. They market invalid products of ZERO pedagogical value and have no accountability for the quality of their products, which are kept almost completely secret. A cursory review of their BEST work (the sample release questions) reveals the tests, especially in ELA, to be complete garbage. But foundations and think tanks continue to issue reports that haul off, at the very beginning, with the garbage data from these garbage tests and then draw insupportable conclusions from them. And politicians are clueless about the details of how the testing scam works because the issues cannot be explained in soundbites.
The teacher’s unions could end this. They could rally their members, call for opt-outs and mass protests, support only candidates committed to ending the federal standardized testing mandate, and so on. It’s time that they stepped up and actually acted like leaders on this.
Their support from parents and from the rank and file among teachers would be overwhelming. But this activism on the part of union leadership is ESSENTIAL to ending high-stakes standardized testing. Only they can mobilize the crowds necessary to put this issue front and center. Parents and teachers are almost entirely of one mind about this. The tests need to end. All the need is the logistical support provided by actual ORGANIZING by folks with the national platform to make it happen.
MANY MILLIONS of teachers and parents would answer that call.
“A cursory review of their BEST work (the sample release questions) reveals the tests, especially in ELA, to be complete garbage.”
I had to proctor a mass giving (in the cafeteria) of the SAT-9 test to freshman one year. I was under no obligation to not look at the test. So, well, you have to know what I did. Yes, I read through the whole test.
Some of the questions were so bizarre like “In the space provided below Write all the math sentences with whole numbers that you can” (yep that’d be an infinite amount available).
I believe that the lowest percent of “bad” questions with either no answer or more than one answer, or just questions that didn’t make sense was 33% in a section and the highest was around 65% in another.
The scam being that no one is allowed these days to read and discuss the questions outside of, or even during the test. What a scam that anyone would give any credence to any standardized test.
This sort of extreme sloppiness–this bizarreness–in the wording of standardized test questions is not only common but TYPICAL. But State Departments keep thinking that all they have to do, after the last ridiculous test utterly failed, is to find a better one. These people are VERY SLOW LEARNERS.
Basically, if something can be made concrete enough to be close to universally replicable, then it can be validly and reliably assessed, within lots of limits that I’m not going to go into. The problems come when people try to assess what they can’t validly and reliably assess, when they use assessment for the wrong purposes (not for diagnosis or for formative/learning purposes), and when they give assessment too much importance by attaching high stakes to it that lead to distortions and creating and high levels of stress among students and obscene opportunity costs.
Dwayne, it’s not rocket science to figure out, via assessment/measurement/whatever you want to call it, whether a kid knows her times table from 1 x 1 to 12 x 12. Some things are easily assessed. You either know what 8 x 7 is or you don’t. (Yes, I know that there are qualifications to this. A kid can be so stressed out about a test that even if she knows this, she can’t reproduce her knowledge under the conditions of the test).
It does not help, in the fight against standardized testing, to derail and sidetrack discussions of the significant issues with standardized testing with these theoretical discussions of whether measurement is at all possible. That’s a fascinating subject, philosophically, but not of primary importance here. It does help to point out that some things that are important cannot be simply and validly and reliably measured.
“It does not help. . . ”
I have to thoroughly disagree with your assessment that discussing the most fundamental issue, i.e., whether something can or cannot be measured, serves to “sidetrack the discussion”. What is the “discussion” in your eyes?
Since the most fundamental concept shows that what is being attempted, supposed measuring of student learning, is a false idea, cannot be logically and validly done, where is the sidetracking? IT IS THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE wherein any and all other discussions are actually the sidetracks. Without that validity all is, as Wilson puts it, “vain and illusory” or as my crude mind works, BULLSHIT.
And that fundamental invalidity serves to DERAIL completely the supporters’ of standardized testing argument. Actually, more like completely atomizes their arguments into oblivion as if a nuclear weapon was detonated on their precious little, actually, BIG LIE.
The supporters of the testing malpractices use pseudo-scientific language to justify their nefarious and harmful to students program. To say that “That’s a fascinating subject, philosophically,” seems to be a very typical American attitude against intellectual discussions (and actually I think the way I have explained it using language that all can understand) that serve to denigrate the argument. PHILOSOPHY BAD!! Don’t use philosophical thinking for one might be accused of being French! Or worse! Why is it so bad that we fight back with using language and arguments grounded in truth?
Perhaps I haven’t explained it well enough, Robert, but I don’t understand why/how you don’t see invalidity of the whole process to be THE most fundamental concern and that it is best to focus on that primary aspect in order to counteract the standards and testing malpractice regime. What other problem with the testing regime is so easily understood by all?
Sigh…thank you Bob. Some things matter and you cannot progress without them.While Duane talks about how senseless all this testing is, one country is getting down to business, and quite frankly they don’t care about his approbation or refutations of idiotic outdated postmodernist theory. It doesn’t matter what you BELIEVE (ideology) but what is actually happening in the world that is creating our future. Unlike Duane, they realize that what students know is critical to the achievement of their long-term goals.That’s why they send their best students to western universities where they make up a huge percentage of graduate students in critical STEM fields.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jennings-china-artificial-intelligence-20190304-story.html
Wow, and not in a good sense, with your seeming approbation of the Chinese human control system. You’d rather embrace psychological terror and live under that tyranny? “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” B. Franklin Perhaps to get an idea of the absurdity and insanity that is a system of social points you might watch an example of that dystopia mentioned by Robert above of the Black Mirror episode about social rating called “Nosedive.”
Wow, again not in a good sense!
That you believe in such utter human atrocities that you propose is beyond my ken. Can I put your rating on your forehead perhaps with some sort of implanted electronic numbering system so we know your social score?
Wow!
I know that you cannot refute nor rebut Wilson’s and my arguments against such tyranny other than to declare that what he and I have proven as completely invalid educational malpractices as “idiotic outdated postmodernist theory.” I don’t think that you even begin to know that supposed “outdated postmodernist theory” of which you speak.
Wow, certainly not in a good sense!!
C’mon, Abby, explain to us all what your designation of supposed “idiotic outdated postmodernist theory” is. Tell us where we have it wrong. I won’t hold my breath as it appears that you don’t have the mental capabilities to do so.
Oh, and I wouldn’t expect the Chinese authorities to give one rat’s ass about me. Maybe you should be a good Chinese and report me to the authorities. Ay ay ay ay ay. ¡Qué locura! What madness! What madness you propose!
Yeah, just what I thought, don’t have anything to back up your false critiques of Wilson’s and my work.