To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
I love this quote from Victor Hugo, I think the policy makers are committing an error with high stakes standardized testing, and we, as educators, need to rise above it.
I very much appreciated Christine's presentation, especially the section on standardized assessments and their uses. I think we have to be incredibly aware of cultural bias in standardized assessments. I see this all the time in Social Studies. Standardized tests will ask questions about seasons, and obviously, our students only have two seasons, so the likelihood of a student having the schema to answer a question about the four seasons is low, and voila, we have low test scores. I also appreciated her saying that standardized tests are TRYING to elicit a bell curve. It is important to note this and make sure that your students are prepared, and hopefully we can produce a lopsided (toward the high range) curve from our class. However, this is nearly impossible because the questions that are used to separate the high from average students are often such minutia that just a few students will have access to that particular content. Anyway, my point is, I think it's important that we don't take standardized testing too seriously, teach to the test, and leave out the fun learning that students enjoy. We need to use our multiple assessments to triangulate a student's true performance level.Quote citation:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/rise_2.html
Image citation:http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z264/chathamboy06/11984881451press827200730432am.jpg
Interesting how you have mentioned about standardized testing being culturally bias. That is exactly what I thought of today when looking through the chapter. We administer these tests every year and even as teachers, we see the reasons that our students are not doing so well.
ReplyDeleteYes, we need to use multiple assessments and be aware about what each assessment really does assess. It's tough with SAT10 being the be-all, end-all for our schools. The public at large generally raise a stink about how poorly we must be teaching our kids when looking at our raw SAT10 data, but no information is given about just what those SAT10 scores mean. I think if we got the word out and everyone became more aware, maybe we can end up choosing a formal assessment that was criterion-referenced instead? We shouldn't be comparing our kids to the so-called "representative" group.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with everyone that the standardized tests administered here, specifically SAT 10, is culturally biased. Those assessments were formulated by stateside people for stateside students. Being from totally different cultures across thousands of ocean miles, and having culturally adapted to their styles of learning here, to administer this assessment to them would be unjust, especially since how well they do is based upon how they compare to their counterparts nationwide. GDOE should come up with their own localized formal assessments that would be geard toward our own students and cultures.
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