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Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Reliability in Assessment??

Teaching science requires more diagnostics than assessment. Diagnostics are meant to properly measure a student's abilities so that they may be more efficiently taught in the classroom. Using the standardized test format is not only demoralizing but also a lose-lose situation since the standards are constantly not consistently implemented from school to school.

It's a little ironic isn't it? That standardized tests are not really standardized?

Assessment is supposed to tell you something about your students and what they have learned rather than to put students on the spot and just say you're either good enough or you're a complete failure. Students have looked at their PSAT scores and after realizing that college is no longer a possibility, they give up in school. These are students who score in the bottom 20th percentile. Who wouldn't be demoralized?!

Standardized tests in this sense are only meaningful to students when the students are competent and have prior knowledge coming into the class. It's pretty common to get students in the classroom who have never had science before or never even considered looking something up on their own.

The skills required to effectively learn science, particularly a course as content-heavy as living environment, weighs very heavily on a student's skills and interests outside the classroom.

It's unfortunate, but it's not really possible to properly address this issue since there's just not enough academic support at home or from their families. Though the families are generally interested in their student's progress, there are those who treat these schools like day care facilities. They drop off their kids and expect wonderful grades. School and district accountability is supposed to be enough to get students to do the work, right? HA!!

One of the biggest things you learn as a fellow is how to properly assess your student's progress. I feel like creating these assessments requires more than just a series of questions. It's a matter of classroom observation and tracking student progress over time. Even this late in the year, I still don't feel like I have the ability to reliably assess a student's abilities.

Recently my students took a computerized reading test. It's one of those computer adaptive test like the GRE's where the question difficulty is based on how you answer the previous question.

To our surprise, more than half the student's who took the test scored at or above grade level in reading comprehension. However, these statistics could change since only the more capable students actually showed up to take the reading test. I was very shocked to see that some of my lowest performing students have above grade level reading abilities. But who is wrong? My classroom observation and assessment? Or the computerized assessment?

In my shoes, a majority of students have the scientific competency of 6th to 7th graders.
They have difficulty reading a textbook that is tailored for 9th graders so the reading test is suspicious to me.

It's another one of those things you reflect on as a fellow. Am I doing things properly? Am I assessing my students accurately? You observe some of the other teachers in your school and they are successful using unimodal methods, and yet differentiated modalities just doesn't work. So is differentiated instruction BS?

If the reading test is true, then the students simply lack the discipline to sit and learn a complex idea for more than 15 minutes. Which leads me to believe that the "Power Teaching" model would be so effective in NYC schools. If you don't know what that is, check out YouTube and look up "Power Teaching" and you'll see how micro-lectures and class structure plays a role in student interaction help chunk bits of information more effectively.

I have yet to try any of those methods, but perhaps in the fall, there's room for changes...

This is what frustrates me in the tail end of my first year. All the changes I want to make I won't be able to make until the year is over and I get a new cohort of students. I have painfully learned in my first year that change in education takes time, several years instead of the months and weeks that you would want.

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