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

How many here give NO tests, NO quizzes, NO exams to assess student performance? How many courses did you take through your academic career that had none? How many of us have never faced critical 'examinations' in our lives. This is all part of life--at least part of the well ingrained societal system of life.

Now I don't disagree that many of the tests are poor and that teaching to THESE tests is bad. Rather I would call for tests that require the skills and thinking that we really want students to attain. If the tests were good--if they tested critical thinking and the like--then teachers would teach to those tests--they'd have to. Fix the tests--that would go a long way towards fixing the problems John and others have related.

In the end though--the real question, for all levels of education, IS ASSESSMENT. How do you best assess student performance, student advancement, student success? 'Trust the professional teachers' is what one often hears, is even what I would hope would be applied to me personally, but the sad truth is that such trust has failed in the past. Everyone, at every educational institution, knows there are teachers around them who are not very professional, who do not know their subjects, who are not doing their jobs vis a vis the students. Sometimes the numbers of such teachers is far too high. Someone is PAYING us to educate their children, and especially in the public sector there have been spectacular failures in this. NCLB exists BECAUSE of the poor job that was being done prior. It may not have fixed the problems (at least not all) and many believe it has caused new problems, but to believe that eliminating NCLB and high stakes testing will suddenly fix our education problems is senseless. Throwing more money at education without a solid plan of professional development for teachers, pedagogical reform, meaningful assessment, and most importantly increased parental and student involvement AND responsibility in the education process will most likely be of little help.

Students HAVE to get more involved in their own education--they need to want to learn (past the 3rd grade!). Those of us at the College level, especially at private colleges, are fairly well insulated from the apathy and even active resistance of students to being educated. We don't face sub-cultures and seriously devalue education--making it a social stigma rather than a badge of success. As the family structure disintegrates, so does the prime support for schools, teachers, and students. How many of us 'performed' at school to please our parents?

So--if we don't want testing, especially high stakes like graduation tests, SAT, GRE, ACT, etc., then we had better have an alternative that can satisfy the public as a whole and the legislators in particular, that we are succeeding in our task to education the children. My take is to fix the tests--the infrastructure, the culture, the expectations are already in place for 'testing' as the primary means of assessment--lets use it more wisely.

Rick

***************************
Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
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Free Physics Software
PC & Mac
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html
*******************************


----- Original Message ----- From: "John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>
To: "'Forum for Physics Educators'" <phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 8:37 AM
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] STUDY SUGGESTS NO CHILD LAW MAY BE DUMBING DOWNSTUDENTS


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!
>


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