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Sarah Schaller Welsh

Freakonomics » What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Q... - 42 views

  • Gaston Caperton
  • Standardized tests have much in common with French fries. Both of them differ in composition as well as quality. French fries are available in numerous incarnations, including straight, curly, skins-on, skins-off, and, in recent years, with sweet potatoes. Regarding quality, of course, the taste of French fries can range substantially – from sublime to soggy. It’s really the same with standardized tests.
  • Take the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, a federal accountability law requiring scads of standardized tests to be used in evaluating schools. Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
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  • all schools – kindergarten through college – should employ exit exams allowing us to determine what students have actually learned. We owe it to our students to make sure that they’ve been properly taught.
  • Then there are the questions of what to do with the results. I have actually sat through an extended discussion of how we could use regression analysis to parse out the contribution different teachers made to a group of students’ performance on a set of standardized tests. The answer was, yes it was possible, and could in fact be used to award merit pay increases. But nobody left the room feeling very comfortable that there would be any gain in what we knew made for good teaching.
  • Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB that are completely free of open-ended questions.
  • educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
  • But is it fair to give students what amounts to a counterfeit passport to college or work? And do such tests spur high school teachers and principals to aim high with their students? To both questions, the answer is, “No.” In most states today, high school exit tests serve the same role as the standardized tests mandated by NCLB: they try to jack up the floor of student achievement in the nation’s schools. The best high school exit tests would be end-of-course exams akin to the “comprehensive” exams that many colleges and universities require students to pass in their majors before graduation – tests, that is, that would raise the ceiling of student achievement.
  • High-stakes testing has narrowed and dumbed down curricula; eliminated time spent on untested subjects like social studies, art, and even recess; turned classrooms into little more than test preparation centers; reduced high school graduation rates; and driven good teachers from the profession. Those are all reasons why FairTest and other experts advocate a sharp reduction in public school standardized testing and a halt to exit exams.
  • igh school grade
  • point average is a better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT.
Judy Robison

Free Practice Tests - Varsity Tutors - 44 views

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    Assessment | News Varsity Tutors Debuts Free Test Question Site By Dian Schaffhauser 11/07/13 Varsity Tutors, a providor of private tutoring to students online, has launched a new, free service with the intention of becoming the "Khan Academy" of practice tests. The company has introduced a Web-based assessment system intended to replace other forms of educational content such as SAT or ACT preparation books or online subscriptions to assessment materials. Varsity Learning Tools, as it's called, makes hundreds of free practice tests available in 95 subjects. Currently in open beta testing, the site lists assessment tests by subject and allows the user to choose to answer a single test, flashcards, or a question of the day. Each question can be shared through social network services. When the student answers it, a second page displays with an assessment and explanation and data on how much time was spent on the question, and how many others answered it correctly." (Read more at http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/11/07/varsity-tutors-launches-free-test-question-site.aspx?=THEEL#8hQzr0oig6X2IZmS.99)
Steven Szalaj

Raise the bar with national exam for teachers - chicagotribune.com - 53 views

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    Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers.  It's about time...
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    About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
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    Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
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    Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
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    You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.
Barbara Moose

Free Online Typing Test | Test Your Typing Speed | WPM - 1 views

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    This free typing test calculates how fast you type (Words Per Minute) and compares your results with people from all around the world." />Typing Test, Online Typing Test, Free Typing Test, Typing Speed Test, WPM, Words Per Minute, Typing Games, Touch Typing, Test Typing Speed, Qwerty, Dvorak, Flash Games, Typing Software, Practice Typing
Mr. Stanley

Department of Psychology :: Principles of Learning :: University of Memphis - 62 views

  • The single most important variable in promoting long-term retention and transfer is "practice at retrieval"
  • -learners generate responses, with minimal retrieval cues, repeatedly, over time.
  • without relying on external memory aids.
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  • practice at retrieval has been shown to be more effective than merely spending more time studying the material without actively engaging in memory retrieval.
  • By doing so repeatedly, especially in varied contexts, the learner strengthens access to this information,
  • given minimal cues
  • two different effects. One is the "testing effect," in which intervening tests improves learning of concepts that are retrieved from memory
  • when intervening tests are spaced, two tests were more effective than a single test in improving long-term retention of material.
  • Compared to a cued-recall or recognition intervening test, a free-recall test produced better performance on a final test, regardless of the format of the final test.
  • Educational Applications
  • Align lectures, assignments and tests, so that important information will have to be remembered at different times
  • Have students retrieve this information in multiple ways by either varying the questions or context in which it is assessed:
  • During lectures, ask students questions to elicit responses that reflect understanding of previously introduced course material.
  • This serves the dual purpose of probing students' knowledge, so that misconceptions can be directly and immediately addressed in the lecture.
  • On homework assignments, have students retrieve key information from lectures and readings.
  • Chapter summaries, for instance, may include study questions that ask students to recall major points or conclusions to be drawn from the reading.
  • Encourage group studying in which students actively discuss course topics
  • test questions offer another opportunity for "practice at retrieval,"
  • Ideally tests should be cumulative and test items should probe for understanding of the material.
smilex3md

Basic item analysis for multiple-choice tests. Kehoe, Jerard - 1 views

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    Basic Item Analysis for Multiple-Choice Tests. Jerard Kehoe, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University This article offers some suggestions for the improvement of multiple-choice tests using "item analysis" statistics. These statistics are typically provided by a measurement services, where tests are machine-scored, as well as by testing software packages. The basic idea that we can capitalize on is that the statistical behavior of "bad" items is fundamentally different from that of "good" items. Of course, the items have to be administered to students in order to obtain the needed statistics. This fact underscores our point of view that tests can be improved by maintaining and developing a pool of "good" items from which future tests will be drawn in part or in whole. This is particularly true for instructors who teach the same course more than once.
Steve Ransom

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids - The Answer Sheet - The Washingto... - 6 views

  • A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
  • “If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.
  • “It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning.
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  • Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.
  • “It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”
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    A powerful anecdote which speaks to the value of our current silly test-based education trajectory
Glenn Hervieux

My View of the PISA Scores | Diane Ravitch's blog - 42 views

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    "The news reports say that the test scores of American students on the latest PISA test are "stagnant," "lagging," "flat," etc. The U.S. Department of Education would have us believe-yet again-that we are in an unprecedented crisis and that we must double down on the test-and-punish strategies of the past dozen years. The myth persists that once our nation led the world on international tests, but we have fallen from that exalted position in recent years." BUT....is what we're being told really the whole story? This blog post will help you see that our nation's creativity and innovation has NOTHING to do with our place nationally & internationally with test scores. So...how should that influence our approach to education?
tanya miller

Teacher Console | Diigo - 185 views

shared by tanya miller on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
    • Cheri Krockover
       
      One class with 2 groups
    • Ben Nason
       
      You are given one class. From there you can add as many groups as you want
    • William Giancoli
       
      Is anyone else experiencing difficulty adding students and groups?
    • Steve Weller
       
      Does anyone know why diigo is listed as a proxi server?
    • mike
       
      anyone not able to add students with existing email accounts?
    • Carol Lautenbach
       
      My Assistant tried to add a batch of students and nothing showed up in the end. Hmmmm....
    • Susan Gorman
       
      testing
    • Tony Loughland
       
      how do you move bookmarks around between groups?
    • Adrienne Christiansen
       
      I'd like to know how to move bookmarks from my individual Diigo to my course diigo. Help?
    • hieu hieu
       
      hieu
    • Gregg Fletcher
       
      Can anyone tell me why these sticky notes are on my library screen.  I did not realize this screen was open to the world.
    • bryan pasquale
       
      they were marked as public
    • Sheila Grimm
       
      Any advice for a brand new user? I am trying to create a group for students who need extra help studying for those high stakes tests.
    • Elizabeth Achor
       
      I'm lovin' it!
  • Group Name
    • tamacek
       
      use this one
    • Diane Shryock
       
    • Deb Little
       
      I am confused.
    • tanya miller
       
      Can students create groups within the class group that I set up?
  • Options
    • mesturas sanchez canton
       
      Aanimádevos a utilizar os marcadores sociais. é unha boa forma de organizar as nosas preferencias na rede
    • Jennifer Strickland
       
      i am trying this out
    • Robert Guihan
       
      I have found this useful. I am mostly a fly on the wall but many members have shared excellent websites and articles.
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    • Tara Park
       
      This is a test
    • anonymous
       
      this is a test 2
    • Eleanor Cerny
       
      tesing.....
    • Kristine Rebstock
       
      Test
    • hieu hieu
       
      test
    • teacherlisa
       
      text
    • Dinah Hunt
       
      practice test for class demo
    • Sandy M
       
      test sticky
    • Noe Granado
       
      I received the test...
    • Noah Ralston
       
      Did I pass or fail the test?
    • José Serruto
       
      Very interesting
  • As an educator, your account has been given special privileges to create / manage student accounts and class groups (student email addresses not required.)
  • StudentTestGroup (4 members)
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    Class with 2 groups
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Siri Anderson

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 41 views

  • found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.
  • I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,
  • When they are later asked what they have learned, she went on, they can more easily “retrieve it and organize the knowledge that they have in a way that makes sense to them.”
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  • But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers.
  • “The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you’re not learning,
  • when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information,
  • What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
  • They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory
    • Siri Anderson
       
      In the narrative recall version of the test the subjects were made to reread the article numerous times. In the concept mapping version they were directed to read the article once. The different outcomes could just be related to the power of re-reading something. Also, narrative recall isn't what most tests look like. That label is clearly a misnomer.
Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Mark Gleeson

Standardised testing - Who's at fault? System, teacher or student? Pt 2 Teacher/Student - 0 views

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    So while it is an exaggerated work of fiction, lets look to Miss Bonkers and the school in Diffendoofer for guidance. Yes we need standardised testing to check progress and assess learning. Yes we need to see if our students are performing to a standard that is accepted across the country. But we do not have to teach the content of a test or how to take a test. We need to teach them how to THINK.
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
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  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
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    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
  •  
    Excellent summary!
Roland Gesthuizen

New Study Shows Irrelevance of Gains on State Tests. UPDATE! « Diane Ravitch'... - 40 views

  • When students are prepped and prepped and prepped to pass the state tests, they aren’t necessarily better educated, just prepared to take a specific test. Too much prepping distorts the value of the test.
  • aren’t
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    "An important new study  by Professors Adam Maltese of Indiana University and Craig Hochbein of the University of Louisville sheds new light on the validity of state scores. This study found that rising scores on the state tests did not correlate with improved performance on the ACT. In fact, students at "declining" schools did just as well and sometimes better than students where the scores were going up."
Peter Beens

Nurture Shock : A 5 Minute Intelligence Test for Kids - 0 views

  • But the two tasks I’ve described are a real test for children, developed in Switzerland. They are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores. On 5 and 6 year-old kids, this simple test is virtually synonymous with a 90-minute intelligence test of their full cognitive capacities; the two tests have a 99% correlation. It turns out that kindergartners who are really good at sorting line length and relative weight are the exact same kids who score high on tests of conceptual reasoning, memory, and attention.
Carol Mortensen

Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association - Is your child or loved one at risk for Sudden... - 0 views

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    The loss of many of our young students and athelets is due to this. Please take a minute and read. "This form will help you identify those who may be at risk and who will benefit from additional testing to look for conditions that cause SCA. The HCMA offers the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Risk Assessment Form, SCARAF, This form should be distributed to all school age children and families. This 2- page form has the AHA 12 point items addressed and written in a manner that a parent is more likely to provide as clinically relevant data to a physician. This document was created with the assistance of Dr. Robert Campbell and the HCMA. It offers 3 options Yes - No - Unsure. Should the parent/you answers Yes or Unsure to any question they are offered 3 steps to follow: 1. Bring this form to your personal physician and discuss cardiac screening. 2. Seek an evaluation from a cardiac professional including appropriate testing (ECG, echocardiogram and additional if warrented) and consultation. 3. Share this information with your family. This tool creates a clinical indication for testing should the parent identify a risk factor; therefore, the clinical evaluation and testing should be covered by all major insurance programs in the USA. This tool also has the power to move beyond the child and to the parent as it is far more common to see a death under the age of 54 and over the age of 24, therefore the parents are at a similar risk as the child."
Matt Renwick

Principal: What I've learned about annual standardized testing - The Washington Post - 36 views

  • the Department of Education should not be “a national school board.
    • Matt Renwick
       
      Quote from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island)
  • to think that first-graders fluently reading would “cure poverty” is not only indefensible, it trivializes the great economic inequities that are the root cause of our nation’s greatest challenge.
  • I have witnessed schools move from progressive practices such as inclusion, to the grouping of special education students with ELLs and other struggling learners into “double period” classes where they are drilled to pass the test.
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  • There is now minimal support from the research community for the use of annual test scores in teacher evaluations, often referred to as VAM.
  • When teachers begin losing their jobs based on test scores, how easy will it be to attract excellent teachers to schools with high degrees of student mobility and/or truancy? Who will want to teach English language learners with interrupted education, or students with emotional disabilities that make their performance on tests unpredictable?
danthomander

Meet the New Common Core - The New York Times - 19 views

  • Standardized tests certainly aren’t going anywhere. States that have dumped exams aligned with the Common Core aren’t dumping high-stakes testing; they’re just switching to new tests, like the ACT’s Aspire. (Other ACT offerings include the Explore, the Engage and the Compass. Apparently standardized tests are titled by the same people who name midsize sedans.)
  • The Common Core is the way math was taught before. True, the new South Carolina standards are 92 percent aligned with the Common Core. But the Common Core was 97 percent aligned with the math standards South Carolina was using before! The term “number sentence,” which the comedian Stephen Colbert mocked, is 50 years old, and the kind of problem it describes appears in textbooks from the 1920s.
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    "Standardized tests certainly aren't going anywhere. States that have dumped exams aligned with the Common Core aren't dumping high-stakes testing; they're just switching to new tests, like the ACT's Aspire. (Other ACT offerings include the Explore, the Engage and the Compass. Apparently standardized tests are titled by the same people who name midsize sedans.)"
Mark Gleeson

Getting to know the child behind the test score - 1 views

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    Standardised testing and the resultant scores are good indicators for potential learning difficulties or strengths. But they're no substitute for face to face interactions. And sometimes that one on one interaction needs an experienced hand to really pinpoint the need. I'm committed to working with Gloria as much as I can this year. If our chance meeting didn't occur, she could have spent the year only working with a teacher aide group with students with learning difficulties. We can't let the push for standardised testing, even at the diagnostic rather than school comparison level, blind us form the fact we need to get to know our students more intimately. We owe it to the Glorias in our classrooms.
Roland Gesthuizen

What measures the best teacher? More than scores, study shows - 1450 WHTC Holland's Hom... - 138 views

  • researchers found they could pick out the best teachers in a school and even predict roughly how much their students would learn if they rated the educators through a formula that put equal weight on student input, test scores and detailed classroom observations by principals and peers
  • Judging teachers primarily by student performance on state tests, for instance, turned out to be highly unreliable, with little consistency from year to year. Judging them chiefly by a principal's observations failed to identify those teachers who could be counted on to boost student proficiency on state math and reading tests.
  • This should be a very big red flag to all those policy makers who think they can have test-based accountability be half or more of a teacher's evaluation
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    "(Reuters) - Effective teachers can be identified by observing them at work, measuring their students' progress on standardized tests - and asking those students directly what goes on in the classroom, according to a comprehensive study released Tuesday."
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