Re: [Phys-l] STUDY SUGGESTS NO CHILD LAW MAY BE DUMBING DOWNSTUDENTS

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

There is an interesting article in the NYTimes about the effects of medical
hypnosis.  Apparently it can work very well, but not for everyone, when the
person wishes to alleviate anxiety, nausea, pain...  So anyone with
excessive test anxiety should consider it.

As to shielding students from high stakes tests, that is not the problem.
The problem is shielding teaching from high stakes tests.  Every teacher I
know, and every researcher I know have reported that high stakes testing has
degraded teaching.  It is bad enough that standard teaching is not optimal
because it does not take into account how the brain works.  But high stakes
testing encourages administrators to push a one size fits all methodology
with large amounts of drill and practice rather than good teaching.

When you have students who will tell you that 5/100 is 5.0 after being able
to tell you that 5/10 is .6, there is something terribly wrong.  But these
students are being noodled by material that they have no hope of
understanding.  Once they get to HS it is assumed they know arithmetic.
Well they can mechanically do it with pencil and paper, but they have
absolutely no numeracy.  So they can not understand how scientific notation
works.  They can not understand 3 variable equations such as F=m/a or
preferably a=F/m which requires both compensation reasoning and proportional
reasoning that they do not possess.

High stakes testing is retarding the growth of better teaching as was
documented by a report on Reagan HS in Houston by Rice U.  And no amount of
student responsibility will fix severe problems in understanding numbers.
They need professional help of the kind that is not available in most
schools.  So the students have "been taught" that it is useless to try.

I personally diagnosed problems my children were having and devised
strategies to fix them.  I found my daughter couldn't count properly in 4th
grade, so I helped her understand how it worked.  The students in lower SES
neighborhoods have parents who can't help with these problems, and teachers
who also can't help because they don't understand these problems, and do not
have time because of the mandated curriculum load.

High stakes testing also has limited predictive value of future performance.
The SAT only has some predictive value for the freshman year in college, and
little value after that.  The 12 question Lawson test of Scientific
Reasoning may actually be a much better predictor of future success in
science and math.  I had students who were admitted into engineering
programs, but did not have conservation reasoning, so they failed.  But
specialized methods of teaching similar to PER can bring up the Lawson
scores and success.  See the ADAPT program for some evidence.

The tests have become the object, and education has become very low on the
list.  The rich people can afford the tutors and psychologists to fix the
problems, while the poor as usual get no help.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> > I'm very much of the "get over it!" school, too, but ... I'm also not.
> >
> >  I *never* had test anxiety until about my sophomore year of college, in
> a differential equations class. I loved that class, loved the subject,
> loved the professor, knew the material extremely well, and so on. There
> should have been no reason for me to be anxious. Yet I did get extremely
> anxious before and during the test, and the mere fact that I was anxious
> launched into a nasty feedback loop. (I did fine on the test, but not
> without a struggle.)
> >  Since then, I've had mild anxiety during tests (perhaps, if such things
> can be quantified, at the same level as most people). I wish I knew what
> changed, and how I could stop it. It might be somewhat of a "what if I get
> nervous?" thing, which leads to nervousness itself. Before that diffeq
> test, I'd never experienced that ridiculous, unreasonable nerviness.
> > I don't see the value of shielding students from high stakes testing--
> they
> > will encounter it sooner or later driving test, SAT, GRE, college exams,
> > job interviews, performance evaluations, etc.  There can always be a
> > mechanism for students who have performed very well in classes but
> tested
> > very poorly to be retested, but testing is part of life.  Get over it!