I picked this cartoon because this was my colleagues and I at the start of my teaching career. I started teaching during the testing frenzy brought into our classrooms by NCLB. My job and my schools rating depended on the results of the state test. At my charter elementary school we were instructed to teach only subject areas tested (math & reading) all day. We were told to give them multiple practice tests on top of the district wide benchmark assessments. It seemed like all we did was test, test, test. It stripped my teaching of creativity and pleasure.
In chapter four they talk about how teachers need to understand the assessment results they receive and what they really mean. Some schools/disrticts compare scores from year to year. To me, this doesn't make sense because these are different groups of students. Is it fair to compare the fourth graders in 2012 to the ones in 2013? Not to mention the norm will be different every year. A great example of misinterpreted test scores happened with the autistic boy I have worked with for the past two years. The NWEA reading test he took at the start of third grade determined his lexile reading level was 11.5. When he asked what 11.5 meant, his teacher told him it was 11th grade 5th month reading level. He automatically jumped to the conclusion that there were NO books at the school library that would be hard enough for him because our school only goes to grade 8. (He wouldn't check a book out if it had under 300 pages for an entire year) His teachers mistake was failing to explain that 11.5 meant that he read the 3rd grade passage as well as an 11th grader, NOT that he could necessarily read and understand a text given to an 11th grader. Misinterpretations of test scores happen all the time. My advice to all teachers is to make sure you understand the results before you begin to explain them to parents and students.
I admit that my experience working at a state test sweat shop has given the term assessment a negative connotation that I need to overcome. I don't believe that teachers/districts/states should use summative assessments alone to determine the fate of a school or the quality of its teaching staff. As discussed in the readings, there are SO many ways to tell if our students are getting anything out of their experiences in our classroom. One thing I have used with great success is the student porfolio. All of the problems mentioned about portfolios are true. They take a lot of time and they're a lot of work...but it's worth it. Once you set the expectations and procedures for adding materials to the student portofolio, it works like a well oiled machine. I do a mixture of student and teacher choice in what was included in the porfolio. These binders were most useful to me when meeting with parents that didn't speak English. The portfolio speaks for itself in a way and students can walk their parents through the work they have done throughout the year.
Including student evaluations of their own work is an integral aspect of the portfolio. They will look back at their work at the end of the year and see challenges they overcame and ways they have improved throughout the year. The worst kind of self evaluation is the kind that students never share with anyone. Self evaluation and assessment is most valuable when it is done with a witness. This give accountability to the exercise. One of my favorite ways to grade writing assignments is with the writer and a rubric. Having a mini conference with the writer and their work asks student to self evaluate and defend the choices they made in their paper.
What I've learned about assessment in the years following the testing frenzy is that we have to give students many opportunities to prove their mastery of the content. We also have to involve them in the process of grading and creating assessments.
Your personal anecdote about the student who misunderstood his test results really made me wonder how many of my students really know what the scores represent beyond “good” or “bad” and especially what the scores don’t tell students about their abilities. I remember at the beginning of last school year the staff at my school had a heated meeting talking about ACT data that not only exposed many of the flaws in the use of the data, as you mention, but also exposed the fact that many teachers didn’t know exactly what the tests tested or what the results meant. While I think there is a place for standardized testing as a tool to get a big picture of where students are with very specific skills, I agree that portfolios, or any implementation of multiple types of assessments, best help students self-assess, create goals from those assessments, and grow academically.
ReplyDeleteI was also wondering how effective it is for a school to test on a yearly basis and compare them against static standards for the grade level. How is it useful to compare the same set of standards to a different set of children once a year instead of measuring progress? The school climate is constantly changing every year and I have spoken with other teachers where one year, most students were comprehending most of the material then in the following year, most students weren't comprehending the material even though the content didn't change. I understand that assessments are a necessary component but it would seem more beneficial to perhaps do a longitudinal assessment rather than static yearly assessment for the school. But perhaps this is too costly to track. Either way, I think you raise a good point about the school assessments dictating the classroom assessments and teaching. We want to foster students to be life-long learners instead of dreading to learn something because they'll be tested on it!
ReplyDeleteHello Vera -
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post, and I appreciate your angst about assessments. Standardized tests have been here a long time. Even someone as ancient as me completed standardized tests in grade school back in the 1970s. I remember taking the Iowa tests, and vaguely recall taking something referred to as the "California Test". This always sounded strange, as my school was in Park Ridge, and I was fairly certain that Park Ridge was still in Illinois. I remember taking the tests, but I have no recollection of my teachers prepping us specifically to take the test. How accurate can an assessment be if one school teaches to the test and another focuses on the curriculum and lets the test results speak for themselves? The same issue applies to the SAT and ACT. I tool both tests in 1980 or 1981. We never prepped, and no one ever retook the test if the score was lower than hoped. Nowadays students, or least those in affluent neighborhoods, have private tutoring and take the test multiple times. I thought I had a high score when I had a 30, but I'm amazed at some of the near perfect scores that kids are routinely getting now. However what is the significance of a score when the student can raise the score upwards of 5 points after tutoring and multiple re-takes? What are we really trying to accomplish with standardized tests?