A few loyal readers wrote worried emails: Grant, are you OK???
Yes, I’m just fine. Alas, I have been swamped by work and travel demands (back and forth twice to Europe as well as to LA for ASCD) in the last month.
I plan to get back into the blog swing of things shortly.
A few – random? related? – thoughts:
1. Many people have asked for my views on Diane Ravitch’s recent post about ‘reformers’ and ‘resistance’. I have no new thoughts, just my previous one.
2. Check out http://testingtalk.org which was set up by Lucy Calkins and a number of us, to monitor and collect feedback on the pilots of the new national tests. Over 250,000 hits to the site so far.
A comment at the site revealed a big misunderstanding, one that I see over and over vis a vis testing. Here’s the complaint from a teacher who monitored a pilot:
The instructions for the writing prompts were totally inadequate – the test didn’t cue the kids to do all the things they normally do when preparing good writing pieces. Not a single child took advantage of the scrap paper: no spontaneous graphic organizers, no drafting of responses, no little notes to self. I refuse to blame the children.
You should blame the teachers, not the testmaker or the children. The whole point of a test is to see if students have internalized and can transfer their learning – in this case, about writing. The test should NOT cue the writer on process. By test time, the process should be understood and used by students who learned it. That is precisely the point of an education, hence the right move in assessment: what can you do when NOT prompted to do everything?
14 Responses
thanks, Grant – good clarification for all. Glad also you are back up and blogging. I am on a high school improvement team – representing first nations perspective [interesting story that I hope to tell you sometime] and we used one of your Blogs – hope to get more people following it,
Marcy
Absolutely- it is silly that a teacher would feel like part of the instructions/cues given to a test taker would be what supplies to have on hand. And maybe not every child needs a separate piece of paper to get their thoughts together.
This brings to mind one of my pet peeves I have about “grade worthy” exercises…..
It is a good idea to teach organizational skills. It is not a good idea to have “notebook checks” every grade term as a significant grade in the class- especially at the high school level. Every person organizes in a bit different manner. Having to have everything how the teacher would organize is silly and does not teach them how to formulate their own way of organizing. They should learn how to develop their own system which may look very different from the teacher’s way.
Agreed – pet peeve of mine when teachers demand a certain way of taking notes. That there be a system should be required; that there be models available for inspection and trying out should be a part of instruction. And then in later assessments, teachers should recommend changes in note-taking based on results. (This requires open-notes testing to really determine if the system works, so that it is not just a question of difficult recall.)
Grant, what do you think about providing the test takers with a more general “Don’t forget to…” rather than specifically prompting them to do certain things at certain times?
I don’t think it is acceptable. The whole point of a test is to see who can do what when not prompted. And where would you draw the line?
Your response made me think about colleagues who like to write the learning target or standard they are assessing before each question. Seems like maybe that practice falls into the same “prompting” category?
I disagree. You are assuming that these tests are suddenly different than all the others students have taken their whole lives. That is just a tad arrogant. Don’t you think? Tests are not real writing situations just because you want them to. They have a context , a history. You sit down and you do what you are told. The high stakes nature of these tests make them even more problematic. Test makers ignore the experience of the test taker in favor of their ideas about what learning should be. Reminds me of R.D. Laing’s cult classic, The Politics of Experience that opens with a psychology lecture told from the point of view of the schizophrenic subject. What appears logical to test makers is not to the student. Blame the teacher for not de-stressing the kid but then again, they don’t let the teacher share the test beforehand. All is cloaked in secrecy.
Perhaps all true but irrelevant to my criticism. It is not the job of tests to prompt the learner to recall all relevant prior learning. This is true of teacher tests as well. I think your antipathy to standardized testing is causing you to overlook this basic fact about the goal of teaching.
Then again the goals of testing are to create a certain amount of failure and if you help too many kids with clear directions you might get less failure and the test would be less credible.
You are confusing norm-referenced with criterion-referenced tests. The latter do not presume failure.
But the test results will still be in a bell-shaped curve, so any middle-of-the-road criterion will still generate a certain amount of failure. Barry’s point is valid.
Not in a criterion-referenced test. Bell curve is forced in only norm-referenced testing.
Grant,
Point on tests I think valid. I would have thought instruction on preparing for all sorts of writing using all sorts of organisers the point. My point is that having had students use various organisers some more suited to different genres than others – then the student can decide on both the appropriate genre to make a response or critique or argument or …. with an appropriate organiser to whatever the prompt or situation (hopefully not just the small test sample but for life experiences and contributions).
I think the noble goal of creating these ‘better” assessment that measure true learning is countered by the pressure cooker environment they create. I once asked a 2nd grader what he thought of the CTBS test. His reply. “It’s ridiculous. They try to trick you and ask questions you don’t know the answer to.” Like it or not, this is the culture these new tests live in. I don’t blame the teachers for this.