Group items tagged

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.)

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.

dropping items entirely from your revision, which is the advice given by many study guides, is wrong. You can stop studying them if you've learnt them, but you should keep testing what you've learnt if you want to remember them at the time of the final exam.

the researchers had the neat idea of asking their participants how well they would remember what they had learnt. All groups guessed at about 50%. This was a large overestimate for those who dropped items from test (and an underestimate from those who kept testing learnt items).

But the evidence has a moral for teachers as well: there's more to testing than finding out what students know – tests can also help us remember.

They initiated their study in 1979, and have been assessing the participants based on a wide range of variables (e.g., school performance, IQ, leadership, happiness) across multiple contexts (laboratory and home) since.

Cognitive giftedness matters.

While intellectually gifted children were not different than the comparison group with respect to their temperament, behavioral, social, or emotional functioning, they did differ in regards to their advanced sensory and motor functioning starting at age 1.5, their ability to understand the meaning of words starting at age 1, and their ability to both understand and communicate information thereafter.

Parents of intellectually gifted children reported similar observations and were more likely than those of average children to say that their kids actively elicited stimulation by, for example, requesting intellectual extracurricular activities.

The researchers also measured what they described as academic intrinsic motivation and identified the top 19 percent of the 111 adolescent participants as “motivationally gifted,” displaying extreme enjoyment of school and of learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks and an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, and persistence.

Interestingly, they found very little correspondence between intellectual giftedness and motivational giftedness.

Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.

suggest that gifted curiosity is a distinct characteristic that contributes uniquely to academic success.

“Motivation should not be considered simply a catalyst for the development of other forms of giftedness, but should be nurtured in its own right,”

All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without—giftedness is clearly a developmental process.

“giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”