| I once had a conversation with one of the poo-bahs
| responsible for the California standards. He kept telling me
| how lofty the standards were. I kept telling him I didn't
| care. "The /test/ is the only thing that matters, and the
| test is lousy. The teachers are going to teach to the test,
| no matter what the standards say. If you really believe the
| standards are driving the test, then your standards are
| lousy, because they produce a lousy test. And on the other
| hand, if the standards are not driving the test, it doesn't
| matter what the standards say.
| So don't tell me about the lofty standards; tell me how
| you're going to straighten out the test."
|
Interestingly enough, I just spent last week prostituting myself for our
state, writing questions for our physical science/physics standards. It
was a frustrating experience in many ways. In part, because I was
forced to do things that contradict some of the excellent advice I see
here at Phys-L. Also, in part because the standards are not written
very well and are quite muddy.
This brings up a couple of observations.
One agreeing with the above. I tried to take the viewpoint that the
test is going to be the true standards, not the verbiage in the
standards document. So here was a chance to hopefully at worst "do no
harm" and at best to improve things a bit.
I have increased empathy for my colleagues in K-12, because I don't see
any easy way that they can cope with these standards documents other
than ultimately trying to see what the actual tests seem to be testing.
One obvious problem is how are they supposed to guess how the question
writers are interpreting the standards as they write their test
questions? It is a big morass.
The major winners seem to be the test writer companies and consultants.
In our situation last week, the state Dept. of Ed. got a group of folks
in each of about 8 disciplines to write questions. They hired one
consultant form "Harcourt" to give some presentations to us and help
guide us in the writing of questions. The state hasn't actually figured
out what they were going to do with these questions. So we were in a
sense just creating elements for a test bank. Our state BOR is also
hoping, somehow, to use this work written for the state K-12 standards
for some purpose for common course numbered introductory courses. The
questions we write, were naturally enough supposed to directly relate to
various stuff in the standards, but we were allowed to only write 4
choice multiple choice questions. Of which, responses like "none of the
above", "all of the above", "not enough information to tell" were
expressly forbidden. On the one hand this is an impossible task. On
the other hand, one actually had rather significant freedom, as just
about any question on a physics standard could be argued to match a
standard at the required "Bloomian Taxonomy of Thinking Skills Level".
It was quite an eye-opening experience. I'm not sure that the process
is resulting in anything that will improve the education in our state.
But I met colleagues that I haven't met before and I got a week's pay,
so I'm glad I participated; and hopefully "I did no harm".