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Tag Archives: Testing

ETS Using Test Results To Justify Its Test-Filled Vision

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

"America's Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future", Closing the Achievement Gap, Common Core State Standards, ETS, High-Stakes Testing, Income Inequality, Meritocracy, Millennials, OECD, PARCC, PIAAC, SAT, STEM Fields, Testing


America's Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (cover), February 17, 2015. (ETS).

America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (cover), February 17, 2015. (ETS).

I actually like the Educational Testing Service (ETS). I’ve done work for them as a consultant and as an AP Reader over the years. I enjoyed most of my testing experiences with them, especially the AP US History Exam of 1986. I like many of the conferences that they host and sponsor, and they beat almost all with the spreads of food that they provide at their events. Yet even with all that, ETS’ agenda is one of promoting the ideal of a meritocratic society with a repressive regime of testing that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt the socioeconomic determinism of standardized assessments. Or, in plain English, tests that favor the life advantages of the middle class and affluent over the poor, Whites and assimilated East Asians over Blacks, Latinos, and only partially assimilated immigrants of color.

Such is the case with a nearly unreported new report from ETS. They had scheduled a press release for the “America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future” on Tuesday, February 17th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The organizers postponed the event, though, because of the phantom snow storm that was really a typical snow shower. So I didn’t get to ask my preliminary questions about the findings of researchers Madeline J. Goodman, Anita M. Sands, and Richard J. Coley, that despite the educational gains of the generation born after 1980, they sorely lack the skills they need for life and work in the twenty-first century. My questions? How could anyone have expected millennials to develop independent thinking, critical thinking, innovative thinking, writing and other analytical skills if they spend precious little time in their education actually doing any of these things? How would the constant barrage of high-stakes tests from kindergarten to twelfth grade have been able to instill in students ways to think outside the box, to look at issues with more than one perspective, to stand in opposition to policies based on evidence, and not just based on their gut or something they picked up from a test?

Mass of students taking high-stakes test, September 4, 2014. (http://newrepublic.com via Shutterstock).

Mass of students taking high-stakes test, September 4, 2014. (http://newrepublic.com via Shutterstock).

Well, the report is worse than I thought. Goodman, Sands and Coley put together an argument that makes circular reasoning look like a Thomas the Tank Engine episode. The authors produced this first in a series of reports for ETS, relying solely on “data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).” The PIAAC, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a survey that assesses the skill levels of a broad spectrum of people between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five, the primary working population in most developed countries (meaning the US and Canada, the EU, the Baltic states, Australia, Japan and South Korea). ETS and the authors claim that this survey instrument is better at assessing how far behind millennials in particular are when compared to “their international peers in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments (PS-TRE)” than the international testing of high school students alone. And as such, the authors concluded that

PIAAC results for the United States depict a nation burdened by contradictions. While the U.S. is the wealthiest nation among the OECD countries, it is also among the most economically unequal. A nation that spends more per student on primary through tertiary education than any other OECD nation systematically scores low on domestic and international assessments of skills. A nation ostensibly based on the principles of meritocracy ranks among the highest in terms of the link between social background and skill level. And a nation with some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world houses a college-educated population that scores among the lowest of the participating OECD nations in literacy and numeracy.

I don’t about anyone who reads my blog, but I find these conclusions smack of so much hypocrisy that they’re stomach-ache-inducing. Really? Years of promoting testing at every level of K-12 education, everything from state and district-level assessments to PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessments, and it’s only because of growing economic inequality that US students-turned-adults don’t score well in the super-advanced, highly skilled categories? Not to mention, the SAT, AP exams, GREs, LSATs, GMATs, MCATs, Praxis I, Praxis II, and so many other ETS exams that it would cause the average psychometrician’s head to explode? Seriously?

Terrier dog chasing its own tail, March 3, 2015. (http://webmd.com).

Terrier dog chasing its own tail, March 3, 2015. (http://webmd.com).

This is yet another case of the dog chasing its own tail. A case where the $3-billion-per-year nonprofit just outside Princeton, New Jersey is sounding a clarion call for a crisis that it helped create. Not the one on the rapid rise of inequality, though its promoting of a false meritocracy through constant testing has served to lull affluent America into an intellectual coma. But in the cutting of history and social studies, literature and art, theater and music classes, from kindergarten really all the way through a bachelor’s degree program.

In the promotion of testing as the way to address achievement gaps, to deal with the so-called education crisis, so much of what was good about K-12 and even higher education has fallen away. Reading for the sake of reading and learning has drifted away, with more English and less literature in schools and at many colleges and universities than ever. Want to teach someone how to express themselves in writing, to express their numeracy in proofs? That thinking runs counter to what goes on in the Common Core school systems of 2015, meaning most people will either never develop these skills, or, if lucky, might develop them somewhere between their junior year of college and in finishing a master’s degree or doctorate. We emphasize STEM fields with billions of STEM dollars without realizing that great STEM is much more than equations and formulas. It’s also imagination, applying the ability to break down pictures, ideas, words and sentences contextually to the world of numbers and algorithms.

And don’t give me this whole “the SAT now has an essay section on it” spiel! Fact is, everyone knows that expressing their words on paper, on a screen or in speech is critical in modern societies. After almost seven decades of testing, ETS figured this out, too? What they haven’t figure out yet, though, is how to make standardized high-stakes testing a necessary for the entire working adult population in the US. Believe me, that’s where they want to head next.

How High-Stakes Testing Strangles Motivation and Competition

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ability Grouping, Competition, Education Reform, High-Stakes Testing, K-12 Education, MAP-M, MAP-R, Montgomery County Public Schools, Motivation, Mount Vernon public schools, MSA, SRA, Teacher Effectiveness, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Styles, Testing, Tracking


Homer strangles Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

Homer strangling Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

One of the biggest casualties in the current K-12 education reform effort — otherwise known as measuring teacher effectiveness through high-stakes testing — is the notion of competition, academic and otherwise. At least, students competing to make themselves better students, better athletes and even better people in the process of matriculating through elementary, middle and high school. Competition suffers when the teaching, motivational, psychological and financial resources necessary to level the K-12 playing field have gone instead to testing companies and psychometricians.

So much has been the emphasis on testing and raising test scores that most in education reform now think competition among students on the K-12 stage is an abomination that must be rooted out, and not part and parcel of the learning and human development process. This is really too bad. For what often makes school fun for children is a healthy dose of competition throughout the process.

To use myself and my ten-year-old son as but two examples of what has occurred in K-12 education reform over the past three and a half decades, it is apparent to most educators how much has changed as a result of the fear of competition and lack of autonomy to motivate students. Testing, of course, was part of my educational experience growing up. From third grade through sixth grade in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools, the school district tested us with the SRA (Science Research Associates, Inc.) exam in reading comprehension and mathematics every spring. At the end of the school year, we’d learn how well or not so well we tested in these areas in terms of grade level.

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

The Mount Vernon Board of Education used the test for two purposes. One, it was a diagnostic exam, as it would show students with reading and math comprehension skills at, above or below grade level. When I took the SRA in third grade, for example, I read at the 3.9 grade level, or on par as a third marking period third-grader. When I took the fourth grade version of the SRA the following year, I had jumped up to a 7.4 in reading, or the equivalent of a mid-year seventh-grader.

The district used the SRA for a second purpose, though, at least by the end of sixth grade. It was part of a package that determined what academic track a student would take as they moved on to middle school. In my case, my straight A’s and my SRA scores (which put me at the 12th grade level in reading comprehension and 11th grade level in math) put me in the gifted-track magnet program called Humanities in 1981. For some of my elementary school classmates, it meant general education classes, or, in a couple of cases, remedial or special education classes.

Ability tracking through an examination and grades over four years has its own sinister flaws in terms of race and class — it has tended to disadvantage Black students, especially poor Black kids. But it at least wasn’t the constant mantra of testing that millions like my ten-year-old son has faced since he began kindergarten in August 2008. For nearly every year, my son has taken a school-level, county-district level, or state-level exam in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, including MAP-M and MAP-R, TerraNova and the MSA assessments. What’s more, teachers have administered practice versions of these exams (including unit guides and what they call formatives) about once every six weeks during the school year since my son began second grade.

The constant testing would be meaningful if teachers could get together and decide at the classroom level how best to address students’ needs in areas like reading comprehension and mathematics. These determinations now are tightly controlled at the state, district and school leadership levels, leaving teachers with little room to use their abilities to, well, teach. Really, motivating students — the most critical tool a teacher has in challenging students to become better learners — has become a secondary tool. Especially since these test scores only count in favor or against individual teachers and individual schools, and not specifically for or against students.

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

The last piece is a good thing. Most educators now agree that ability grouping or tracking has fostered too much competition for a school district’s resources among students, teachers, administrators and parents. K-12 education reform has leaned so far the other way, though, that teachers have virtually no say in the curriculum from which they teach, even in kindergarten, and have little from which to motivate their students as learners. In fact, teachers and school-level administrators are the only ones with some motivation and sense of competition, as dollars and jobs are at stake every spring as a result of annual testing. This motivation, though, is all about teaching students how to get better test scores, and not about actual learning, development or academic improvement, a poor way to reform K-12 education.

And it is the motivation to learn that sparks the competition necessary for students to improve themselves, to work with each other to become better students. Another student’s success can even encourage other students to work harder, to make themselves better academically, athletically or even socially. In the current K-12-as-laboratory-experiment-environment, this theme of motivation and healthy competition leading to student success is not only missing. For reformers, it’s been deliberately omitted, as if poor kids and students of color in urban environments don’t need motivation and competition to become better students and people.

The Wussification of Grading

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Core Curriculum, Education, Elementary School, Grading Systems, K-12 Education, MCPS, Montgomery County Public Schools, Politics of Education, Psychology of Grading, Test Teaching, Testing, Wussification


Grades Collage, January 24, 2010. (http://hopkins.typepad.com).

Montgomery County Public Schools opened its doors to students for the start of the 2012-13 school year on Monday, August 27. With the start of the school year came some new changes to the report card and grading system, at least for MCPS’ elementary schools. Starting this year, the school district has dropped the old grading system of O, S and N (Outstanding, Satisfactory and Needs Improvement) for first and second graders, and the old A, B, C, D and E system for third, fourth and fifth graders. Instead, they’ve introduced a new grading system for all 1st-5th graders:

Score Description
ES Exceptional at the grade-level standard
P Meets the grade-level standard by demonstrating proficiency of the content or processes for the measurement topic
I In progress toward meeting the grade-level standard
N Not yet making progress or making minimal progress toward meeting the grade-level standard
M Missing data – no grade recorded
NEP Not English Proficient; may be used for a level 1 or 2 ESOL student for no more than two marking periods.

According to MCPS, “[t]he goal of this grading format is to give families a clear understanding of your child’s progress toward end of year grade level expectations.”

Now, I’ve been an educator of some sort now for the better part of two decades, and have worked with several grading systems as a college professor. Not to mention having to learn different grading systems as a student even before that. Trust me when I say that this new grading system isn’t a clear one, and isn’t easy to understand.

But the overall goal is clear. MCPS wants to tie grades to their new yet only partially implemented integrated Curriculum 2.0, adopted as part of the new Core Curriculum for the state of Maryland. It is an integrated, standards-based curriculum that introduces a variety of interrelated themes across the various subjects for K-5 (although fourth and fifth grade will not see any of this curriculum until 2013, when my son is in fifth grade). In theory, this grading system will be more directly tied to students’ proficiency levels in achieving or exceeding state-level standards in reading, mathematics, writing and other subjects for their grade level.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, if a child is proficient in say, the fourth-grade standard for reading, then they would receive a P grade. This is unreasonable, though, and for at least a couple of reasons. For one, it means the entire MCPS elementary school curriculum has become about meeting standards that will be tested at the state-level on the MSA, and at the county level on MAP-R. The curriculum itself has now become integrated into the testing game at the elementary school level.

Second, and maybe even more important here, is the idea that grading-to-a-testing-based-curriculum is a better and more accurate way to assess children. I’m not sure how this helps kids, though. If a student does well enough to score multiple “ES'” on their report card, they’ve exceeded the standard for their grade level. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they are ready for the next grade level. If a student has multiple N’s on their report card, does that mean that they have failed to meet the standards in several subjects at their grade level, that they aren’t making progress?

ESPN logo, August 29, 2012. (http://thebiglead.com). In public domain.

It seems to me that beyond understanding the grading system and the tensions in its methodology is the fact that, in the end, these grades aren’t going to mean much to MCPS’ K-5 students. Or to students across the state of Maryland, for that matter. After all, an A, C, or E is much easier to interpret than an ES, P, I or N (or ESP(i)N, as I’ll begin to call it from now on). Psychologically speaking, while this grading system takes some symbolic pressure off of performance via state and county test scores, it also means that kids won’t have a full appreciation for success, mixed success or failure beyond a curriculum of testing.

It would’ve been smarter to go to a qualitative grading system — something that I know some schools and universities have used over the years — than to this one that ties curriculum and grading systems to testing. At least with a descriptive system of grading, you can get in a single paragraph a fairly focused analysis from a teacher about a student’s progress, their strengths, weaknesses and where they’ve had good or great success. This new MCPS grading system, though, is the academic equivalent of giving every team in a children’s soccer league a trophy, whether their record was 10-0 or 0-10. It pretty much renders grading meaningless, as everything is about standards and measurements, and ultimately, testing.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

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