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Scientifically Tested Tests - nest0r - 2010-09-21
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/opinion/20engel.html
"AS children, teachers and parents sprint, slink or stumble into the new school year, they also find themselves laboring once again in the shadow of standardized tests. That is a real shame, given that there are few indications that the multiple-choice format of a typical test, in which students are quizzed on the specific formulas and bits of information they have memorized that year, actually measures what we need to know about children’s education.
There is also scant evidence that these tests encourage teachers to become better at helping individual children; in fact, some studies show that the tests protect bad teachers by hiding their lack of skill behind narrow goals and rigid scripts. And there are hardly any data to suggest that punishing schools with low test scores and rewarding schools with high ones improves anything. The only notable feature of our current approach is that these tests are relatively easy to administer to every child in every school, easy to score and easy to understand. But expediency should not be our main priority when it comes to schools.
Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live... "
Scientifically Tested Tests - kazelee - 2010-09-21
Practice tests are awesome. I got the highest percentile in every single test in middle school. I promptly purged all information when the test was done.
Yeah Standardized.
Scientifically Tested Tests - jcdietz03 - 2010-09-22
Don't people "labor in the shadow of standardized tests" a little closer to test time? Maybe an article on the merits (or lack thereof) of placement tests would be more apropos.
I'm 30 now. When I was in high school (1996-99), they didn't teach to standardized tests. They just had a very easy test that was necessary to pass prior to high school graduation. The first chance to take the test is 2nd semester of 8th grade with another chance every semester after that; 95% of students pass by the second time they take it. So there was never a real need to teach to the test at might high school. I don't really know what the curriculum was driven by - I think it was designed to help students get into college.
Scientifically Tested Tests - Surreal - 2010-09-27
I don't want to say much, but
"For instance, using recordings of children’s everyday speech, developmental psychologists can calculate two important indicators of intellectual functioning: the grammatical complexity of their sentences and the size of their working vocabularies (not the words they circle during a test, but the ones they use in their real lives). Why not do the same in schools? We could even employ a written version, analyzing random samples of children’s essays and stories.
Psychologists have also found that a good way to measure a person’s literacy level is to test his ability to identify the names of actual authors amid the names of non-authors. In other words, someone who knows that Mark Twain and J. K. Rowling are published authors — and that, say, Robert Sponge is not — reads more. We could periodically administer such a test to children to find out how much they have read as opposed to which isolated skills they have been practicing for a test. "
First one is pretty hard to use as the contexts someone is in has a strong effect on what kind of language you're using - with four-five-year-olds it's easier because the family has such a strong effect on what language the kid learns to use (even so, in some cases kids may be developing linguistically rapidly outside the home, at the home of a friend who has more "sholarly" siblings and parents or of different accents etc etc). A ten-year-old will show very varied patterns in communication depending on if it's talking with friends, teachers, parents and so on. Moreover, there's a considerable risk that different styles of talking will be valued higher or lower depending on the social class they are associated with - such that swear words etc etc is degraded even though the child may be very creative in the way they use different styles. In other words, "encyclopedia" is impressive, "cock-slobbering douchebag" is foul and related to non-literacy.
Same goes for book authors, some serious discrimination issues would unavoidably appear - not all children like to read the "masterpieces", what about comic books, manga, the hilariously bad youth soccer books, all that?
(In both cases, it could be said that the author is trying to apply methods that have been found useful for one group onto another for which they just don't work)
I'm just trying to say, questioning the current methods and giving suggestions for different ones is all well, but we should all remember to try to think ahead and question ourselves to as to not bring about a revolutional systems that just end up being just as problematic as their predecessors...
Scientifically Tested Tests - jcdietz03 - 2010-09-27
There's an element to testing regarding keeping test takers "on their toes."
The Testing Effect refers to the fact that the same population will score far worse than previously when the test changes, then steadily better over time.
If names of authors is on the test, people will study names of authors, get better at recognizing them, and do well on the test. This probably isn't useful information. What they did at my school is have you read six level-appropriate books per semester and write a book report about them (I call them plot summaries).