Bob Shepherd is an editor, author, and recently retired teacher in Florida. He worked for many years as a developer of curriculum and assessments. He posted this comment here.
Combating Standardized Testing Derangement Syndrome (STDs)
The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in that industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid. They typically have not been subjected to anything like the standardization procedures used, in the past, with intelligence tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and so on. The mathematics tests are marginally better than are the tests in ELA, US History, and Science, but they are not great. The tests in English Language Arts are truly appalling. A few comments:
The state and national standardized tests in ELA are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists of world knowledge–knowledge of what–the stuff of declarative memories of subject matter. What are fables and parables, how are they similar, and how do they differ? What are the similarities and differences between science fiction and fantasy? What are the parts of a metaphor? How does a metaphor work? What is American Gothic? What are its standard motifs? How is it related to European Romanticism and Gothic literature? How does it differ? Who are its practitioners? Who were Henry David Thoreau and Mary Shelley and what major work did each write and why is that work significant? What time is it at the opening of 1984? What has Billy Pilgrim become “unstuck” in? What did Milton want to justify? What is a couplet? terza rima? a sonnet? What is dactylic hexameter? What is deconstruction? What is reader response? the New Criticism? What does it mean to begin in medias res? What is a dialectical organizational scheme? a reductio ad absurdum? an archetype? a Bildungsroman? a correlative conjunction? a kenning? What’s the difference between Naturalism and Realism? Who the heck was Samuel Johnson, and why did he suggest kicking that rock? Why shouldn’t maidens go to Carterhaugh? And so on. The so-called “standards” being tested cover ALMOST NO declarative knowledge and so miss much of what constitutes attainment in this subject. Imagine a test of biology that left out almost all world knowledge (How do vertebrates differ from invertebrates? What is a pistil? A stamen? What are the functions of the Integumentary System? What are mycelia? What is a trophic level?) and covered only biology “skills” like–I don’t know–slide-staining ability–and you’ll get what I mean here. This has been a MAJOR problem with all of these summative standardized tests in ELA since their inception. They don’t assess what students know. Instead, they test, supposedly, a lot of abstract “skills”–the stuff on the Gates/Coleman Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list, but they don’t even do that.
Second, much of attainment in ELA involves mastery of procedural knowledge–knowledge of what to do. E.g.: How do you format a Works Cited page? How do you plan the plot of a standard short story? What step-by-step procedure could you follow to do that? How do you create melody in your speaking voice? How do you revise to create sentence variety or to emphasize a particular point? What specific procedures can you carry out to accomplish these things? But the authors of these “standards” didn’t think that concretely, in terms of particular procedural knowledge. Instead, in imitation of the lowest-common-denominator-group-think state “standards” that preceded theirs, they chose to deal in vague, poorly conceived abstractions. The “standards” being tested define skills so vaguely and so generally that they cannot, as written, be sufficiently operationalized, to be VALIDLY tested. They literally CANNOT be, as in, this is an impossibility on the level of drawing a square circle. Given, for example, the extraordinarily wide variety of types of narratives (jokes, news stories, oral histories, tall tales, etc.) and the enormous number of skills that it requires to produce narratives of various kinds (writing believable dialogue, developing a conflict, characterization via action, characterization via foils, showing not telling, establishing a point of view, etc.), there can be no single prompt that tests for narrative writing ability IN GENERAL. But this is a broader problem. In general, the tests ask one or two multiple-choice questions per “standard.” But what one or two multiple-choice questions could you ask to find out if a student is able, IN GENERAL, to “make inferences from text” (the first of the many literature “standards” at each grade level in the Gates/Coleman bullet list)? Obviously, you can’t. There are three very different kinds of inference–induction, deduction, and abduction–and whole sciences devoted to problems in each, and texts vary so considerably, and types of inferences from texts do as well, that no such testing of GENERAL “inferring from texts” ability is even remotely possible. A moment’s clear, careful thought should make this OBVIOUS. So, the tests do not even validly test for what they purport to test for, and all this invalidity in testing for each “standard” doesn’t–cannot–add up to validity overall.
Third, nothing that students do on these exams even remotely resembles what real readers and writers do with real texts in the real world. Ipso facto, the tests cannot be valid tests of actual reading and writing. People read for one of two reasons—to find out what an author thinks about a subject or to have an interesting, engaging, vicarious experience. The tests, and the curricula based on them, don’t help students to do either. Imagine, for example, that you wish to respond to this post, but instead of agreeing or disagreeing with what I’ve said and explaining why, you are limited to explaining how my use of figurative language (the tests are a miasma) affected the tone and mood of my post. See what I mean? But that’s precisely the kind of thing that the writing prompts on the Common [sic] Core [sic] ELA tests do and the kind of thing that one finds, now, in ELA courseware. This whole testing enterprise has trivialized education in the English language arts and has replaced normal interaction with texts with such freakish, contorted, scholastic nonsense.
Fourth, a lot of attainment in ELA is not about explicit learning, at all, but, rather, about acquisition via automatic processes. So, for example, your knowledge (or lack thereof) of explicit models of the grammar of your native tongue has almost nothing to do with your internalized grammar of the language. But the ELA standardized tests and the “standards” on which they are based were conceived in blissful ignorance of this (and of much else that is now known about language acquisition).
Fifth, standard standardized test development procedures require that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that results for the the test and for particular test items and test item types correlate strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested. No such validation has been done for any of the new generation of state and national standardized ELA tests. None. And, given the vagueness of the “standards,” none could be. Where is the independent measure of proficiency on Common Core State Standard ELA.11-12.4b against which the items on the state and national measures have been validated? Answer: There is no such measure. None. So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment–that they have been independently validated.
The test formats are inappropriate.
The new state and national tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and so-called evidence-based selected response items, or EBSR). On these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test what in EdSpeak is called “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers, these days, all insist on all the multiple-choice distracters, or possible answers, being “plausible.” The student is to choose the “best” answer from among a list of plausible answers. Well, what does plausible mean? It means “reasonable.” In other words, on these tests, many reasonable answers are, BY DESIGN, wrong answers! So, the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky–impossible for kids to answer, because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments, for example, that objective question formats are generally not great for testing so-called “higher-order thinking” and are best reserved for testing straight recall. The use of these inappropriate formats, coupled with the sloppiness of the test-creation procedures, results in question after question where there is, arguably, no correct answer among the answer choices given or one or more choices that are arguably correct. Often, the question is written so badly that it is not, arguably, answerable given the actual question stem and text provided. I did an analysis of the sample released questions from a recent FSA ELA practice exam and demonstrated that such was the case for almost all the questions on the exam, so sloppily had it been prepared. But I can’t release that for fear of being sued by the scam artists who peddle these tests to people who aren’t even allowed to see them. Hey, I’ve got some great land in Flor-uh-duh. Take my word for it. Available cheap (but not available for inspection).
The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—have instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive. The results of the high-stakes standardized tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use. Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. The results always come too late to be of any use, anyway. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.
The tests have enormous opportunity costs.
I estimate that, nationwide, schools are now spending a third of the school year on state standardized tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent doing test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping. That’s all lost instructional time.
The tests have enormous direct, incurred costs.
Typically, the US spends 1.7 billion per year under direct contracts for state standardized testing. The PARCC contract by itself was worth over a billion dollars to Pear$on in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of SBAC and the other state tests to that. No one, to my knowledge, has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that were (and continue to be) necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs vastly exceed the amount spent on the tests themselves. Then add the costs of test prep materials and staff doing proctoring and data chats and so on. Then add the costs of new curricula that have been dumbed down to be test preppy. Billions and billions and billions. This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, invalid as assessment and of no diagnostic or instructional value?
The tests dramatically distort curricula and pedagogy.
The tests drive how and what people teach and much of what is created by curriculum developers. These distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog. To an enormous extent, we’ve basically replaced traditional English curricula with test prep. Where before, a student might open a literature textbook and study a coherent unit on The Elements of the Short Story or on The Transcendentalists, he or she now does random exercises, modeled on the standardized test questions, in which he or she “practices” random “skills” from the Gates/Coleman bullet list on random snippets of text. There’s enormous pressure on schools to do all test prep all the time because school and student and teacher and administrator evaluations depend upon the test results. Every courseware producer in the U.S. now begins every ELA or math project by making a spreadsheet with a list of the “standards” in the first column and the place where the “standard” will be “covered” in the other columns. And since the standards are a random list of vague skills, the courseware becomes random as well. The era of coherent, well-planned curricula is gone. I won’t go into detail about this, here, but this is an ENORMOUS problem. Many of the best courseware writers and editors I know have quit in disgust at this. The testing mania has brought about devolution and trivialization of our methods and materials.
The tests are abusive and demotivating.
Our prime directive as educators should be to nurture intrinsic motivation in order to create independent, life-long learners. The tests create climates of anxiety and fear. Both science and common sense teach that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like this testing system are highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. See this:
https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=C111US662D20151202&p=daniel+pink+drive+rsa
The summative standardized testing system is a backward extrinsic punishment and reward approach to motivation. It reminds me of the line from the alphabet in the Puritan New England Primer, the first textbook published on these shores:
F
The idle Fool
Is whip’t in school
The tests have shown no positive results; they have not improved outcomes, and they have not reduced achievement gaps.
We have been doing this standards-and-standardized-testing stuff for more than two decades now. Richard Rothstein, the education statistician, has shown that turning our nation’s schools into test prep outfits has resulted in very minor increases in overall mathematics outcomes (increases of less than 2 percent on independent tests of mathematical ability) and NO IMPROVEMENT WHATSOEVER in ELA. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen some improvement. Rothstein also showed that even if you accept as valid the results from international comparative tests, if you correct for the socioeconomic level of the students taking those tests, US students are NOT behind those in other advanced, industrialized nations. So, the rationale for the testing madness was false from the start. The issue is not “failing schools” and “failing teachers” but POVERTY. We have a lot of poor kids in the US, and those kids take the tests in higher numbers than elsewhere. Arguably, all the testing we’ve been doing has actually decreased outcomes, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects, for cognitive tasks, of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. Years ago, I watched a seagull repeatedly striking at his own reflection in a plate glass window, until I finally drove him away to keep him from killing himself. Whatever that seagull did, the one in the reflection kept coming back for more. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, “Gee, we should do a lot more of that.” But that’s just what the Gates-funded disrupters of U.S. education–those paid cheerleaders for the Common [sic] Core [sic] and testing and depersonalized education software based on the Core [sic] and the tests are asking us to do. Enough.
In state after state in which the new generation of standardized tests has been been given, we have seen enormous failure rates. In the first year, fewer than half the students at New Trier, Adlai Steven, and Hinsdale Central–the best public schools in Illinois–passed the new PARCC math tests. In New York, in the first year of PARCC, 70% of the students failed the ELA exams and 69% the math exams. In New Jersey, 55% of students in 3-8 failed the new state reading test, and 56% the new math test. The year after, Florida delayed and delayed releasing the scores for its new ELA and math exams. Then they announced that they weren’t going to release only T-scores and percentiles but were still working on setting cut scores for proficiency. LOL. Criterion-based testing, as opposed to norm-referenced testing, is supposed to set absolute standards that students must meet in order to demonstrate proficiency. I suspect that what happened that year in Florida–the reason for the resounding silence from the state–is that the scores were so low that they couldn’t set cut scores at any reasonable level without having everyone fail.
Decades of mandated federal high-stakes testing hasn’t improved outcomes and hasn’t reduced achievement gaps. NAEP results improved a tiny, tiny bit in the first years of the testing because when you teach kids the formats of test questions, their scores will improve slightly. Then, after that, NAEP results went FLAT. No improvement, whatsoever, for a decade and a half. But the testing has had results: it has trivialized ELA curricula and pedagogy and wasted enormous resources that could have been used productively elsewhere.
The test makers are not held accountable.
All students taking these tests and all teachers administering them have to sign forms stating that they will not reveal anything about the test items, and the items are no longer released, later, for public scrutiny, and so there is no check whatsoever on the test makers. They can publish any sloppy crap with complete impunity. I would love to see the tests outlawed and a national truth and reconciliation effort put into place to hold the test makers accountable, financially, for the scam they have been perpetrating.
Anyone who supports or participates in this testing is committing child abuse. Have you proctored these tests and seen the kids squirming and crying and throwing up? Have you seen them FURIOUS afterward because of the trickiness of the tests? I have.
Standardized testing is a vampire. It sucks the lifeblood from our schools. Put a stake in it.
NB: I would love to be able to post, here, analyses of the sample release questions from ELA tests by the major companies, but I can’t because I would be sued. However, it’s easy enough to show that most of the questions are so badly written that AS WRITTEN, they don’t have a single correct answer, have more than one arguably correct answer, or are unanswerable.
It’s time to make the testing companies answerable for their rapacious duplicity and for stealing from any entire generation of kids the opportunity for humane education in the English language arts.
Great article by Bob Shepherd.
Love this: “Standardized testing is a vampire. It sucks the lifeblood from our schools. Put a stake in it.” AMEN!
I love it and have passed it on.
Thank you, Bob.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The Bottom Line on the 2020 Election
Trump couldn’t protect himself, his wife, and his own staff from Covid-19. He certainly can’t protect (and hasn’t protected) the country.
Vote him out.
Bob, Thank you, thank you. As a Maine educator–relocated from NY–I’ve been saying all this for years. I am regularly in touch with Angus King’s issues people about the horrible waste of testing. I will send this along as well–and to my new Commissioner of Ed–an actual educator. I’ve been saying that the tests are invalid and the CC is a mess dumbing down the curriculum. However, I always say that it is “reliable.” Every year it “reliably” reveals how terrible it is as students who went from being successful readers in second grade–based on valid/reliable tests–turned into reading failures based on these terrible, developmentally-inappropriate tests. However, rather than blaming the test makers, shouldn’t we be blaming the politicians for listening to Duncan, Gates, Coleman–non-educators all. And something I’ll never understand–the Center for American Progress?? We can only hope that this election changes things, but Biden left the Unity Task Force recommendations about education out of the final platform. Sigh, Kathleen Mikulka,
Thank you, Ms. Mikulka, for passing this along! See the updated version, here (I corrected a few typos): https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/why-we-need-to-end-high-stakes-standardized-testing-now/
And thank you, Ms. Mikulka, for your work on behalf of kids. I, too, am worried. After the election is over and the White House has been fumigated, we’re going to have to put the pressure on Joe!!!
Excellent article. Stick to education.
Loved your prediction, April, of the overwhelming victory in the 2020 election of He Who Shines More Orange than Does the Sun. And now, on top of that, you are a critic. Serious skills.
But thank you.
Is there a way to get Bob’s words printed as an op-ed or article (Valerie Strauss ?) and published?
It’s so important and mainstream still buys the tests tell all narrative.
As usual, Bob is correct again….
It seems “we” are helpless before the behemoth of standardized testing. What can be done? How to stop it?
Bravo! What a marvelous, readable, well-informed, and strong denunciation of the testing virus infecting schools. This post is an education in itself, thank you, Bob.
nice word: DENUNCIATION
High-stakes standardized tests do work for their purpose, to find failure. They are failure-seeking weapons designed to destroy public education. All the rest is justification for the cost, and to avoid the implications of their purpose.
Thanks for this very thorough examination of the immense flaws in standardized tests today. The system is built with systemic shortcomings that Bob has outlined and examined. In addition to all the deficiencies cites above, it should be noted that these tests have movable cut scores. The system is rigged so that those that seek to fail more public school students simply raise the cut score bar. How can such an unfair system be considered even remotely accurate when there is no norm reference and there is so much latitude in determining the pass or failure rate from year to year? The cut scores are wholly subjective.
Exactly, Retired Teacher! A few years ago, I looked at decades of cut scores for the New York ELA and Math standardized tests. These jumped around, from year to year, dramatically, like gerbils on methamphetamines. In some years, the cut scores for passing in math were only barely above what one would get by simply choosing answers AT RANDOM. The inescapable conclusion: cut scores were chosen to yield the rests that the state wanted to show this year. We’re pushing x reform. It’s needed because the scores are so low. Our reform is working. See our improved scores?
Where should the cut score be? I don’t know. Tell me what results you want to show.
A scam.
The cut scores are arbitrary and capricious, just like VAM. In this case the pass/fail line is the result of human judgment, and we know human judgment can be easily tainted by politics.
The whole purpose of standards-based assessments is to fire teachers and close schools. Period. The idea of “giving parents useful information” with standardized assessments is nonsense worthy of the harshest ridicule. Giving parents useful information is what teachers do, not what states do. The tech industry must stop wagging the dog with its policy-making sycophants.
Yes: make the public institution “fail” and it is so much easier, then, to hand it over to private interests
“I estimate that, nationwide, schools are now spending a third of the school year on state standardized tests…”
At least. In some places, where scores are the be all and end all in the mind of what Duane Swacker calls adminimals, scores are everything. Adding to the outrage is the use of the ACT, waning on the national stage, as a test that “measures” how good a school is.
Outrageous.
If only we had people like Diane and Bob running the department of education.
One can certainly dream.
Yes!! I second that.
Julian.
What a great post. It summed up in so many ways, all the frustrations I’ve had recently regarding how ELA is taught. I’m a teacher’s aide in a high-needs school, and in one of my 4th grade classes, more than half the class is reading below grade level. How is this possible? While the community might cite the usual reasons (poverty, lack of preschool, lack of libraries/access to books), it seems to me that something else is driving this. We are so programmed to teach reading materials at the proper “skill” level vs. grade level that we don’t have any expectation that the kids can absorb and be exposed to more interesting, fun, engaging reading materials that are appropriate for 4th grade. We only expose them to material where they can decode the words. It’s boring and they know it. I think we should be doing just the opposite: read to them, expose them to rich vocabulary and use it. If they aren’t exposed to this type of more challenging grade-appropriate material, they will never get there. And it shows.
What I say here about syntax could just as easily be said of vocabulary:
Shockingly, what reading comprehension “specialists” commonly do in their classrooms mirrors what happens to kids from impoverished families in which there is less complex verbal communication with children and is precisely the opposite of what is required by the language acquisition device, or LAD. Instead of providing syntactically complex materials as part of the child’s ambient linguistic environment so that the LAD can “learn” those forms automatically and incorporate them into the child’s working syntax, these reading “professionals” intentionally use with children what are known as leveled readers. These intentionally contain short (and thus, usually, syntactically impoverished) sentences that will come out “at grade level” according to simplistic (and simple-minded) “readability formulas” like Lexile and Flesch-Kincaid. The readability formulas used to “level” the texts put before children vary in minor details, but almost all are based on sentence length and word frequency (how frequently the words used in the text occur in some language collection known as a corpus). Shorter sentences are, of course, statistically likely to be syntactically simple. So, as a direct result of the method of text selection, complex syntactic forms are, de facto, banished from textbooks and other reading materials used in reading classes. Teachers go off to education schools to take their master’s degrees and doctorates in reading, where they learn to use such formulas to ensure that reading is “on grade level,” and by using such formulas, they inadvertently deprive kids of precisely the material that they need to be exposed to in order for their LADs to do their work. After years of exposure to nothing but texts that have been intentionally syntactically impoverished, the students have not developed the necessary syntactic fluency for adult reading. When confronted with real-world texts, with their embedded relative and subordinate clauses, verbal phrases, appositives, absolute constructions, correlative constructions, and so on, they can’t make heads or tails of what is being said because the sentences are syntactically opaque. A sentence from the Declaration of Independence, The Scarlet Letter, a legal document, or a technical manual might as well be written in Swahili or Linear B.
Wow, that’s exactly right. So what can be done about it? I work with small reading groups, and this “leveled” reading material is exactly the material they want to use. It doesn’t work.
More on the teaching and learning of vocabulary:
The most common way in which vocabulary instruction is approached in the United States today is by giving students a list of “difficult” (low-frequency) words taken from a selection. So, for example, a student might be assigned the reading of Chapter 1 of Wuthering Heights and be given this list of words from the chapter:
Causeway
Deuce
Ejaculation
Gaudily
Laconic
Manifestation
Misanthropist
Morose
Peevish
Penetralia
Perseverance
Phlegm
Physiognomy
Prudential
Reserve
Signet
Slovenly
Soliloquise
Vis-à-vis
Students are then asked to look the words up in the dictionary or in a glossary, define them, write sentences using them, and memorize them for a vocabulary quiz. As with grammar, the preferred approach involves explicit instruction.
Now, the thing that should strike you, in looking at those words taken out of the context of the novel, is that these might as well be words taken at random by throwing darts a dictionary pages. The task facing the student is quite similar to memorizing a random list of telephone numbers.
Other commonly used instructional techniques include teaching students to do word analysis by having them memorize Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and roots and teaching them to use context clues such as examples, synonyms, antonyms, and definitions. These persist despite abundant evidence that they are, for the most part, not the means by which people acquire new vocabulary. They can be used for that, certainly, but they aren’t the primary means by which vocabulary is acquired.
Again, these instructional approaches fly in the face of the established science of language acquisition. We now know, because linguists have studied this, that almost all of the vocabulary that an adult uses (active vocabulary) and understands (passive vocabulary) is learned unconsciously, without explicit instruction. Far less than one percent of adult vocabulary has been acquired by direct, explicit instruction because direct, explicit instruction is not the means by which vocabulary is acquired. As with grammar, there is a way in which the language-learning mechanism in the brain is set up to learn vocabulary, and that way is not via explicit instruction. So, how do people learn vocabulary? A person takes a painting class at the Y. In the course of the coming weeks, the people around him or her use, in that class, terms like gesso, chiaroscuro, stippling, filbert brush, titanium white, and so on, and, in the absence of explicit instruction, the speaker picks the words up because people’s brains are built to acquire vocabulary automatically in semantic networks in meaningful contexts. Vocabulary is a variety of world knowledge, and like other world knowledge, it is added, incidentally, to the network of knowledge that one has about a context in which it was actually used. For vocabulary to be acquired and retained, it has to be learned in the context of other vocabulary and world-knowledge having to do with a particular domain. Human brains are connection machines. Knowledge is easily acquired and retained if it is connected to existing knowledge. The message for educators is clear: If you want students to learn vocabulary, skip the explicit vocabulary instruction and concentrate, instead, on extended exposure to knowledge in particular domains and enable the students to acquire, in context, the vocabulary native to that domain. The focus has to be on the knowledge domain—on turtles or Egypt or Medieval balladry or whatever—and the vocabulary has to be learned incidentally and in batches of semantically related terms because that is how vocabulary is actually learned. It’s how the brain is set up to learn new words. As it stands now, students are subjected to many, many thousands of hours of explicit instruction in random vocabulary items, with the result that far less than one percent of the vocabulary that they actually learn was acquired by this means. The opportunity cost of this heedless approach is staggering.
My teachers should have ridden with Jesse James
For all the time they stole from me.
–Richard Brautigan
With regard to the vocabulary from Wuthering Heights, teachers are well advised to read with the kids and stop, from time to time, to clarify the meaning of a word in its immediate context but to skip the list and its attendant fruitless pedagogical activities.
One of the reasons that avid readers have larger vocabularies is that they have acquired a lot of vocabulary by reading words in context and not by the laundry lists you show above.
Exactly, Retired Teacher!
In response to “retired teacher
October 12, 2020 at 7:11 pm
One of the reasons that avid readers have larger vocabularies is that they have acquired a lot of vocabulary by reading words in context”
I agree.
One of the things I think is important is the context, age and developmental stage of the learners we are referencing. Young learners (K-2) read masses amounts of text as they grow as readers. Knowing and understanding the approximate level of a book helps teachers put just right books in their book bags, which supports their confidence, sight word recognition, decoding skills etc. They benefit from reading books multiple times and reading easy books too. So I see benefits of leveled text for this age group. And vocabulary acquisition is also built through books, poems and songs being shared and read to students. Rich, read alouds are important for vocabulary and comprehension. Having experiences to connect with text is powerful as well.
Reading and language used at home matters a great deal. Without that prior knowledge and early language skill development – the flexibility to allow schools and teachers to create an environment that responds to what these learners need is key. We need systems that allow for taking the needed time to immerse learning in context and allow for play and exploration in the elementary grades. Especially for these learners that are so called “behind.”
Rushing them to meet testing benchmarks is working against the goal – which all of us reading this blog know.
Please don’t get me wrong. Leveled readers have their place in instruction. But an overreliance on them can be a huge mistake. I often think of the displeasure of Scout’s teacher, in To Kill a Mockingbird, because the girl is reading. LOL. Unless they have been adapted and dumbed down, “Ripe Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hallow” have college-level readability scores but entertained generations of children. The best predictors of later reading ability are, I think, a) being read to by adults and b) the complexity of the syntax and infrequency of the vocabulary of the ambient spoken language in the child’s environment. It’s truly amazing what kids will pick up if motivated by the love of stories and given a chance. Those inborn language-learning abilities are astonishing.
As a textbook editor, I often had these arguments with colleagues who would say, “You can’t use that text. Its Lexile score is grade above reading level.”
“But the story is fascinating,” I would say. “The kids will love it.”
“Can’t do it. We have to publish the reading level with the selection.”
The happy place, ofc, is the kid’s zone of proximal development. But it’s also important to push this often, especially with work presented orally. I always insisted that my students listen to and perform in Shakespeare long before confronting the bare text.
It’s parents that need to understand this!! Most parents really love the tests, because well, competition. Standardized test scores rate schools, rate teachers, rate real estate value, rate/rank/sort children. All because parents feel the need for their kids to be “better than”. I REFUSED for as long as I could, I spoke out as much as I could, but then moved my 2nd child into private school where they don’t use standardized tests or the garbage CC test prep curriculum. When you live in a district that lives and dies by these test scores, it becomes a moot point to try and discuss the horror of these tests. Unless the parents are willing to change, these tests will remain.
Parents love them because they believe the “experts” know more than teachers.
We have 6 year olds spending a lot of time taking tests and given assessments… with the only real purpose to collect “data” for middle managers to make charts and report out to the school board – as if it tells us more than it really does.
Yes!! Thank you, Bob.
Posts like Bob’s need to be prominently displayed in every school faculty room across the country and readily accessible from the home page of this blog.
This is just one exampke of the encyclopedic amout of collective knowledge and expertise posted regularly on this blog.
I am certainly no expert myself, but my guess just based on the level of detail and logical consistency of Bob’s posts on this sort of thing is that he probably knows more about this stuff than virtually anyone else in the country.
But the problem is that much it is not “out in the open” for everyone to see.
The nitwits (economists, techies, politicians, billionaires, basketball players, etc) who have been running — and ruining — education need to be DRIVEN OUT entirely and replaced with REAL experts like Bob, Diane and innumerable others who actually know what the hell they are talking about.
I’m not sure how best to go about that but displaying the information prominently is probably a good start.
Thanks for the comments, folks, and please forgive the typos in my post, which was left as a comment on Diane’s blog and graciously reprinted by her. Here’s a newer, corrected version: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/why-we-need-to-end-high-stakes-standardized-testing-now/
I say we end standardized testing and spend a lot more time doing this:
We would all be a lot happier 🙂
Or this
It’s a hoax of a sham of a con of a grift of a Yucaipa heap (extra credit for anyone who knows source of final reference)!
I was so proud to be teaching when the PARENT opt out movement was in full force on Long Island in New York when nearly 50% of students opted out of testing! Please see the new book on this subject, “Opting Out “ by professor David Hursh and others from the University of Rochester!
Zone of Proximal Development can be used just like Reading Level. My kids were told they couldn’t read certain books because the books were above their level (or below). Kids need both and all. One of my sons was told he read too much non-fiction. Teachers do better to find books that interest the individual and forget all about ZPD or lexiles.
One of the best Reading teachers I ever knew had a HUGE classroom library of YA books. She would get to know her students and suggest books they might like based on their interests, but the kids had enormous leeway to choose books themselves. And often they chose books that were “above their reading level,”
but guess what? If the kid was interested enough, he or she worked through it AND LEARNED A LOT and suddenly the nonreader was a reader. I’ve seen her students, who were failing most of their classes, arguing animatedly, on their own time, about some series of dystopian YA novels, writing fan fiction of their own in the universe of the novels, and so on. It was often difficult to get them to stop the freaking reading long enough to do anything else.
That’s good. That’s very, very good.
One thing that made her such a great teacher: she had read all those YA books herself–hundreds and hundreds of them. She was a walking encyclopedia of YA lit. And so she was able to join in her students’ enthusiasms. That stuff is contagious.
Bob and Diane,
Thank you.I finally had a few spare moments yesterday and today to read this post and all the comments in their entirety, and take notes. This is the insight, the knowledge and understanding teachers have that data surveyors and purveyors lack. I’d like to echo the sentiments of ‘beachteach’, that it would be very helpful if somehow, the gist of this post were published by a university. If only we had our own thinkety tank! I’m going to be able to use it anyway, though, so again, thank you.
The next secretary of education must be guided by those of us with intimate knowledge and understanding, not by data surveyors and purveyors.