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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.
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  • 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"
Troy Patterson

What Doesn't Work: Literacy Practices We Should Abandon | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...-we-should-abandon-nell-k-duke

reading msm333 literacy

shared by Troy Patterson on 04 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • 1. "Look Up the List" Vocabulary Instruction
  • 2. Giving Students Prizes for Reading
  • 3. Weekly Spelling Tests
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 4. Unsupported Independent Reading
  • 5. Taking Away Recess as Punishment
  • 5 Less-Than-Optimal Practices To help us analyze and maximize use of instructional time, here are five common literacy practices in U.S. schools that research suggests are not optimal use of instructional time:
Troy Patterson

Trouble with Rubrics - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...rubrics.htm

blog.me rubrics msm290 assessment education rubric

shared by Troy Patterson on 07 Dec 14 - Cached
  • She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]
  • This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.
  • The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
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  • it’s shortsighted to assume that an assessment technique is valuable in direct proportion to how much information it provides.
  • Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.
  • As one sixth grader put it, “The whole time I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it.  I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if she’s handed out a rubric.  I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”[8]
  • she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”
  • High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.
  • Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated into a shift in writing assessment.”
  • Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified.
  • Consistent and uniform standards are admirable, and maybe even workable, when we’re talking about, say, the manufacture of DVD players.  The process of trying to gauge children’s understanding of ideas is a very different matter, however.
  • Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective. 
  • The appeal of rubrics is supposed to be their high interrater reliability, finally delivered to language arts.
  • Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating. 
  • Once we check our judgment at the door, we can all learn to give a 4 to exactly the same things.
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