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




The current high stakes tests are like the textbooks. Feynman could not fix
the errors in textbooks. He could not get the publishers to bend even a
little bit. The current high stakes tests have produced bad educational
effects. These tests are very poor, and the prospects for fixing them is
dim to nonexistent. England tried the same thing, and now the Shayer
research shows that students are less capable, not more.

Of course the teachers have always given tests that they designed, and this
did not force them into excessive test review. ETS has done a metastudy
that shows that teachers who give tests get better results. But these are
teacher made tests calibrated to their students.

The big problem is that the tests are forcing districts into a one size fits
all approach, which is actually increasing the drop out rate. Meanwhile
diploma mills have increased for those who can afford them. And private
schools in general do NOT do a better job than the public schools as a
fairly recent study showed. And of course the state dumbs down the tests so
they can point to success. Again this has already happened in England with
a much longer history of high stakes. The state tests that I have looked at
generally tested memorized knowledge or simple procedural knowledge, and had
any number of mistakes/misconceptions. As a side note there was a Houston
school which when you looked at the web was an obvious diploma mill and was
accredited. The owner of the school was caught on camera by a local TV
station propositioning a mother for sex so she would not have to pay the
entrance fee. The mother wore a wire, and the "principal" was hot to do it
right in the parking lot in his van.

As to our facing high stakes, we elected to do this by going to college. We
took SATs and other such tests voluntarily. But these tests generally did
not have an absolute cut off. You could get into a different school if you
did not do well. It is true some professions have exams, but again you can
chose a different profession, or like Joe the Plumber you can work as a
helper for someone who is licensed, and dream of owning a buiiness even
though that is impossible. If you couldn't pass the engineering tests you
elected to take kinesiology.

The bad teachers are generally not removed by having high stakes tests. So
a much better method would be to have tests, but as in the past do not put
an absolute consequence for the scores. Rather just make the aggregate
results public for each school, and require all schools to take them. Then
let parents make decisions. Then for public schools that have low
performance have specialists who can look at the reasons, and help the
teachers with their problems. But also institute programs that are know to
work well like Thinking Science. In addition there is some very compelling
evidence from cognitive science that it is possible by training to increase
student short term working memory, and that their ability to perform also
goes up. So here is another thing that could be done in low performing
schools.

Incidentally Shayer&Adey in their research of UK schools found that one
could predict the test score output by looking at the input scores. So that
all schools were essentially doing the same things. But when Thinking
Science was implemented, the output scores were then significantly above the
line. Essentially average schools became high performing, and low
performing would generally score above average. This research had been
going on for a long time, and is just an extension of the Neo-Piagetian
research. It was not a result of draconian high stakes testing.

As to good and bad teachers I have seen that practically none of the middle
school or 9th grade teachers were able to spot the misconceptions in the
texts or from the popular web sites like Brain-pop. And the IIMMS report
showed that Asian teachers had much higher pedagogical content knowledge
despite less schooling.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


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.