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Troy Patterson

CURMUDGUCATION: Norms vs. Standards - 1 views

curmudgucation.blogspot.com/...norms-vs-standards.html

msm333 standards

shared by Troy Patterson on 05 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • A standards-referenced test compares every student to the standard set by the test giver. A norm-referenced test compares every student to every other student. The lines between different levels of achievement will be set after the test has been taken and corrected. Then the results are laid out, and the lines between levels (cut scores) are set.
  • When I give my twenty word spelling test, I can't set the grade levels until I correct it. Depending on the results, I may "discover" that an A is anything over a fifteen, twelve is Doing Okay, and anything under nine is failing. Or I may find that twenty is an A, nineteen is okay, and eighteen or less is failing. If you have ever been in a class where grades are curved, you were in a class that used norm referencing.
  • With standards reference, we can set a solid immovable line between different levels of achievement, and we can do it before the test is even given. This week I'm giving a spelling test consisting of twenty words. Before I even give the test, I can tell my class that if they get eighteen or more correct, they get an A, if they get sixteen correct, they did okay, and if the get thirteen or less correct, they fail.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Norm referencing is why, even in this day and age, you can't just take the SAT on a computer and have your score the instant you click on the final answer-- the SAT folks can't figure out your score until they have collected and crunched all the results. And in the case of the IQ test, 100 is always set to be "normal."
  • There are several important implications and limitations for norm-referencing. One is that they are lousy for showing growth, or lack thereof.
  • Normed referencing also gets us into the Lake Wobegon Effect.
  • On a standards-referenced test, it is possible for everyone to get an A. On a normed-referenced test, it is not possible for everyone to get an A. Nobody has to flunk a standards-referenced test. Somebody has to flunk a norm-referenced test.
  • Troy Patterson on 05 Jun 16
     
    "Ed History 101"
Ron King

What A Billion Dollars Buys You - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-billion-dollars-buys-you.html

shared by Ron King on 09 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Oct 13
     
    At FORBES, we're asked a lot what it takes to live like a billionaire, so we created this interactive with Column Five to explore how different net worth levels-from working wealthy to super rich to filthy loaded-changes your options. Items chosen are plausible purchases based on the level of funds one has in the bank, earning a steady interest rate. How you behave is up to you.
Troy Patterson

The Sabermetrics of Effort - Jonah Lehrer - 0 views

www.jonahlehrer.com/...the-sabermetrics-of-effort

msm299 blog.me

shared by Troy Patterson on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The fundamental premise of Moneyball is that the labor market of sports is inefficient, and that many teams systematically undervalue particular athletic skills that help them win. While these skills are often subtle – and the players that possess them tend to toil in obscurity - they can be identified using sophisticated statistical techniques, aka sabermetrics. Home runs are fun. On-base percentage is crucial.
  • The wisdom of the moneyball strategy is no longer controversial. It’s why the A’s almost always outperform their payroll,
  • However, the triumph of moneyball creates a paradox, since its success depends on the very market inefficiencies it exposes. The end result is a relentless search for new undervalued skills, those hidden talents that nobody else seems to appreciate. At least not yet.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  •  One study found that baseball players significantly improved their performance in the final year of their contracts, just before entering free-agency. (Another study found a similar trend among NBA players.) What explained this improvement? Effort. Hustle. Blood, sweat and tears. The players wanted a big contract, so they worked harder.
  • If a player runs too little during a game, it’s not because his body gives out – it’s because his head doesn’t want to.
  • despite the obvious impact of effort, it’s surprisingly hard to isolate as a variable of athletic performance. Weimer and Wicker set out to fix this oversight. Using data gathered from three seasons and 1514 games of the Bundesliga – the premier soccer league in Germany – the economists attempted to measure individual effort as a variable of player performance,
  • So did these differences in levels of effort matter? The answer is an emphatic yes: teams with players that run longer distances are more likely to win the game,
  • As the economists note, “teams where some players run a lot while others are relatively lazy have a higher winning probability.”
  • There is a larger lesson here, which is that our obsession with measuring talent has led us to neglect the measurement of effort. This is a blind spot that extends far beyond the realm of professional sports.
  • Maximum tests are high-stakes assessments that try to measure a person’s peak level of performance. Think here of the SAT, or the NFL Combine, or all those standardized tests we give to our kids. Because these tests are relatively short, we assume people are motivated enough to put in the effort while they’re being measured. As a result, maximum tests are good at quantifying individual talent, whether it’s scholastic aptitude or speed in the 40-yard dash.
  • Unfortunately, the brevity of maximum tests means they are not very good at predicting future levels of effort. Sackett has demonstrated this by comparing the results from maximum tests to field studies of typical performance, which is a measure of how people perform when they are not being tested.
  • As Sackett came to discover, the correlation between these two assessments is often surprisingly low: the same people identified as the best by a maximum test often unperformed according to the measure of typical performance, and vice versa.
  • What accounts for the mismatch between maximum tests and typical performance? One explanation is that, while maximum tests are good at measuring talent, typical performance is about talent plus effort.
  • In the real world, you can’t assume people are always motivated to try their hardest. You can’t assume they are always striving to do their best. Clocking someone in a sprint won’t tell you if he or she has the nerve to run a marathon, or even 12 kilometers in a soccer match.
  • With any luck, these sabermetric innovations will trickle down to education, which is still mired in maximum high-stakes tests that fail to directly measure or improve the levels of effort put forth by students.
  • After all, those teams with the hardest workers (and not just the most talented ones) significantly increase their odds of winning.
  • Old-fashioned effort just might be the next on-base percentage.
Ron King

CCSS Toolbox - 1 views

ccsstoolbox.agilemind.com/index_flash.html

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    T he Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), the product of a major, multiyear state-led initiative coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), present an extraordinary opportunity for districts across the country to move to higher levels of achievement for all students. These rigorous standards will require that districts reexamine what it means for all students to understand and to do mathematics in ways that prepare them for success in a rapidly changing world.
Ron King

Assessment Training Institute - Tools & Resources: Rubric Evaluations - 0 views

ati.pearson.com/...rubrics.html

shared by Ron King on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 Apr 13
     
    n Chapter 2 of the book Creating & Recognizing Quality Rubrics, we describe a "rubric for rubrics" designed to assist educators to be thoughtful consumers and developers of rubrics for instructional use in the classroom. The various quality levels described by the Rubric for Rubrics are illustrated with many sample classroom rubrics. All classroom rubrics discussed in the book have been evaluated using the Rubric for Rubrics; these evaluations are included on a CD that accompanies the book.
Ron King

Student Engagement More Complex, Changeable Than Thought | University of Pittsburgh News - 0 views

www.news.pitt.edu/...x-changeable-previously-though

shared by Ron King on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 22 Jun 13
     
    "Enhancing student engagement has been identified as the key to addressing problems of low achievement, high levels of student misbehavior, alienation, and high dropout rates." - Pitt professor Ming-Te Wang
Troy Patterson

Why Aren't There More Podcasts for Kids? - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...476157

msm329 podcasting

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “A podcast aimed at 3-10-year-olds that parents could actually tolerate—if you could do it right—would be an unbelievable hit,”
  • NPR saw a 75 percent increase in podcast downloads
  • while adults and teens could easily fill their waking hours with audio, kids would struggle to fill a few.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.
  • Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.
  • When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.
  • That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.
  • high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.
  • TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.
  • Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.
  • Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.
Troy Patterson

Get Rid of Grade Levels: A Personalized Learning Recipe for Public School Districts | E... - 0 views

www.edsurge.com/...pe-for-public-school-districts

msm329 learning education

shared by Troy Patterson on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The problem with the current public education model is that it was created for the industrial revolution.
  • Harrisburg, South Dakota is taking concrete steps to go from teacher-driven to student driven learning.
ocalmy

23 of MiddleWeb's Best New Teacher Resources - 0 views

www.middleweb.com/...ebs-best-new-teacher-resources

middle school

shared by ocalmy on 06 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • ocalmy on 06 Nov 16
     
    Several useful links and resources for middle level educators
Ron King

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) - 0 views

www.stanford.edu/...atters-how-technology-can-help

shared by Ron King on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 22 Feb 12
     
    Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is an independent, non-partisan research center based at Stanford University, the University of California - Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. PACE seeks to define and sustain a long-term strategy for comprehensive policy reform and continuous improvement in performance at all levels of California's education system, from early childhood to post-secondary education and training. PACE bridges the gap between research and policy, working with scholars from California's leading universities and with state and local policymakers to increase the impact of academic research on educational policy in California.
Ron King

20 Education Technology Tools Everybody Should Know About - Edudemic - Edudemic - 0 views

www.edudemic.com/echnology-tools-everybody-know

shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    Although educators tend to feel like they are left all on their own to deal with students that are getting crazier by the day, there are plenty of technology resources that can make their teaching job more effective. Educators should definitely start using some of the online solutions that are meant to promote modern education and take the classroom organization to the next level. In this article, we will cover 20 education technology tools that educators should start using as soon as possible.
Ron King

Affirmation Addiction | Elise Jamison - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...media-addiction_b_4069733.html

shared by Ron King on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 06 Dec 13
     
    Hi, my name is Elise, and I am an affirmation addict. Wow. That was hard. But, hey, they say the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem. Okay, lets be honest, an affirmation addict isn't an actual disease but at this point, it should be. Google's secondary definition of the word affirmation is "Emotional support of encouragement." As human beings, this is something essential to survival, however, my generation has taken it to another level. As a direct result of social media, we crave affirmations from our peers in the form of likes, favorites, shares, retweets, reblogs, and revines. Its almost as if we become irrelevant without loads of internet attention, and with all these new social network apps popping up left and right, keeping up with it all is exhausting. At what point do we draw the line?
Troy Patterson

The Test of the Common Core | E. D. Hirsch, Jr. - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...mmon-core-tests_b_3824859.html

msm258 commoncore

shared by Troy Patterson on 12 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Here's the follow-up post to "Why I'm For the Common Core." It explains why we should be leery of the forthcoming "core-aligned" tests -- especially those in English Language Arts that people are rightly anxious about.
  • These tests could endanger the promise of the Common Core.
  • The first thing I'd want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • My analysis of them showed what anyone immersed in reading research would have predicted: The value-added data are modestly stable for math, but are fuzzy and unreliable for reading.
  • Math tests are based on the school curriculum. What a teacher does in the math classroom affects student test scores. But reading-comprehension tests are not based on the school curriculum. (How could they be if there's no set curriculum?) Rather, they are based on the general knowledge that students have gained over their life span from all sources -- most of them outside the school.
  • The whole project is unfair to teachers, ill-conceived, and educationally disastrous. The teacher-rating scheme has usurped huge amounts of teaching time in anxious test-prep. Paradoxically, the evidence shows that test-prep ceases to be effective after about six lessons.
  • the inadequate theories of reading-comprehension that have dominated the schools -- mainly the unfounded theory that, when students reach a certain level of "reading skill," they can read anything at that level.
  • The Common Core-aligned tests of reading comprehension will naturally contain text passages and questions about those passages. To the extent such tests claim to assess "critical thinking" and "general" reading-comprehension skill, we should hold on to our wallets. They will be only rough indexes of reading ability -- probably no better than the perfectly adequate and well-validated reading tests they mean to replace.
  • The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. (It's passing odd to introduce "Common Core" tests before there's an actual core to be tested.)
Ron King

Resarchers: Math needs a more visual approach | eSchool News - 1 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...h-needs-a-more-visual-approach

shared by Ron King on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 13 Apr 16
     
    Taking a more visual approach to math instruction at the K-12 and higher-ed levels could dramatically change brain development as it relates to math success.
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