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Contents contributed and discussions participated by joyce L

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Assessing 21st century skills | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

  • The Partnership for 21st Century Skills notes that answering the question ‘How do we measure 21st century learning?’ will be critical as we try to prepare students who can be productive citizens in the new technology-suffused, globally-interconnected economy.
  • Like these early attempts, most of these assessments will be performance-based and thus will avoid some of the objections we hear about current standardized tests. Most, if not all, also will utilize the multimedia, simulation, and tracking power of digital technologies to create more authentic assessments of real-life task
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Assessing Assessments | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

  • I can remember the meeting very vividly – teachers were appalled at the presenters statement that one reason an achievement gap exists is due to the pity parties that teachers have for minority students and students who have less than stable home lives.  In essence, teachers and schools do no students favors when they lower the expectations based on the perceived inabilities or emotional concerns that teachers and schools have for struggling students.  What the Ed Trust ultimately condones is the practice of teaching every child as if they were college preparatory material. 
  • and gained insight into how to construct rigorous assessments, which, in turn, forced me to redesign my approach to students, lessons, and teaching.
  • What I have come to understand is that while we scurry to find new ways to meet AYP, get our students over the hump, and keep our schools out of the editorial pages, there is a quiet epidemic of illiteracy spreading in our urban schools.  The Education Trust (while not completely perfect) is trying to address the issue through their programs and protocols.  They seek to shift the paradigm of teachers and schools, not throw money at the urban schools and hope that a miracle happens. 
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  • When any school thinks that a curriculum must be watered down in order to help the minority student, simply because that student comes from a family or neighborhood that is less desirable, then that school is acting in a nearly criminal manner.
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    "The teams meet regularly and each team member is on the "hot seat" - no one is immune from the clinical exercise."
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Performance assessments may not be 'reliable' or 'valid.' So what? | Dangerou... - 0 views

  • Most of us recognize that more of our students need to be doing deeper, more complex thinking work more often. But if we want students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers and effective communicators and collaborators, that cognitively-complex work is usually more divergent rather than convergent. It is more amorphous and fuzzy and personal. It is often multi-stage and multimodal. It is not easily reduced to a number or rating or score. However, this does NOT mean that kind of work is incapable of being assessed. When a student creates something – digital or physical (or both) – we have ways of determining the quality and contribution of that product or project. When a student gives a presentation that compels others to laugh, cry, and/or take action, we have ways of identifying what made that an excellent talk. When a student makes and exhibits a work of art – or sings, plays, or composes a musical selection – or displays athletic skill – or writes a computer program – we have ways of telling whether it was done well. When a student engages in a service learning project that benefits the community, we have ways of knowing whether that work is meaningful and worthwhile. When a student presents a portfolio of work over time, we have ways of judging that. And so on…
  • If we continue to insist on judging performance assessments with the ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ criteria traditionally used by statisticians and psychometricians, we never – NEVER – will move much beyond factual recall and procedural regurgitation to achieve the kinds of higher-level student work that we need more of.
  • “What score should we give the Mona Lisa? And what would the ‘objective’ rating criteria be?”
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    "Most of us recognize that more of our students need to be doing deeper, more complex thinking work more often. But if we want students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers and effective communicators and collaborators, that cognitively-complex work is usually more divergent rather than convergent. It is more amorphous and fuzzy and personal. It is often multi-stage and multimodal. It is not easily reduced to a number or rating or score. However, this does NOT mean that kind of work is incapable of being assessed. "
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