AssortedStuff

In his Monday morning Post education column, Jay Mathews relates the story of a disagreement between a teacher and his principal over the issue of student cheating.

The teacher, an instructor of AP US History in DC, during his evaluation conference explained the steps he took to discourage copying during tests, which included creating multiple versions of the exam and printing the pages in a smaller font.

His principal was not especially impressed.

“You are creating an expectation that students will cheat,” Martel [the teacher] recalls Cahall [the principal] saying. “By creating that expectation, they will rise to your expectation.”

When I asked Cahall about it, he did not deny that he said it. His intention, he said, was not to prohibit Martel’s methods but to urge him to consider another perspective.

“I am not opposed to multiple versions of a test or quiz; it is standard operating procedure for every type of testing program,” the principal said in an e-mail to me. “Instead, I would prefer that teachers use more rigorous assessments when possible, that require written responses and higher levels of thinking. In addition to being more challenging and requiring a sophisticated skill set, these types of assessments are also more difficult for students to copy.”

Mathews sides with the teacher in the dispute since “questioning a teacher’s approach to cheating may be going too far”.

Especially when dealing with an AP classroom, since, of course, that program is the golden salvation of high school education.

However, in this case the principal makes the better point.

We should be asking more of students than just copying back material they’ve been given or making rudimentary connections between the facts, stuff that’s easy to rip off without detection since it doesn’t ask for any value-add from the individual.

In the larger context, we should consider that if a test, or any other assignment, is easy to cheat on, it’s likely a poor or invalid assessment of their learning.

ap, assessment, cheating, high school, jay mathews, teaching

I guess the problem with international assessments, the ones that show US kids doing poorly compared to their peers in other countries, is that we’re using the wrong ones.

At least according to the expert Jay Mathews interviewed.

He says the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)) is a bad one because it doesn’t fit “the way U.S. students are taught” and aligns to the “losing” side in the debate over how to teach math.

Which is to say that the designers of the PISA expect that schools are using curriculums that “make math instruction more relevant to the real world, and emphasize mathematical reasoning more than calculation”.

How dreadful to expect that kids should actually be able to understand and apply math concepts!

PISA includes questions like this one:

For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100 m by 50 m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?

A. 2000
B. 5000
C. 20000
D. 50000
E. 100000

Mathews thinks this is a bad question because it involves too many variables, such as the fact that “some people don’t like to get close to at concerts”.

Certainly it’s a lousy item when students are expected to locate the one and only “right” answer, according to the test writers who have been programmed to create just the right kinds of distracters (been there, done that :-).

However, it’s an excellent question when you want them to consider all those different, and sometimes messy, factors that clutter up problems here in the real world.

And if we also expect students to justify their answer, explain the logic they used to arrive at it, and use that interpretation as part of their assessment.

So, is the problem that we’re giving kids the wrong test?

Or that we’re not teaching to the right assessment?

assessment, jay mathews, math, standardized testing

This year, in our overly-large school district, test scores of students who are learning English rose, a big turn around from last year.

What changed?

This year, federal officials allowed the state to assess thousands of English-learning students through portfolios of their work over the school year instead of through the state reading test.

Our superintendent said that the new assessment “more accurately reflects their learning of English and reading skills”.

So, if a portfolio of work done over a period of time is a better way to assess the skills of students in ELL programs, why isn’t that process also superior to bubbling in multiple choice exams for the rest of our kids?

assessment, nclb, standardized testing

That the meetings of our school board are carried on the local cable system is rather remarkable if you think about it.

After all, how many workers are allowed to watch the board of directors of their company making decisions that affect their jobs.

And, of course, I waste the opportunity and don’t watch them very often. But I did tonight.

Tonight many of my colleagues helped put together the report delivered to the board by our big board on one of their goals, the one that mentions technology.

Students will use technology to access, communicate, apply knowledge, and to foster creativity.

Overall, the presentation was a pretty good representation of what’s going on in our schools, a mixture of the mundane along with snapshots of a few classrooms where teachers are experimenting with the newer tools (go Jenny!).

While the show itself was much better than these things usually are (go Karen!), the most interesting part of the meeting was the reactions of the board members.

As you might expect, a few of them were “amazed” and “dazzled” by the examples and offered up the usual cliches about how kids work so well with all these tools.

I wonder if the member who praised the use of Facebook in her business world realizes that site, and other social networking sites where “the kids hang out”, are blocked in the schools she helps to manage.

And then there was the member who express concern about the lack of keyboarding instruction, stating that “touch typing was the most valuable skill I learned in school”. Really? Not much of an education.

But I was also impressed that several on the board asked some excellent and tough questions that went beyond the dazzle to the issue of whether all the technology is actually improving student learning.

To his credit, our boss offered the only honest answer: we really can’t quantify an increase in achievement due to the use of computers and interactive boards.

Since “increase in achievement” is code for higher test scores, I doubt he will be able to come back in a year as requested by one member with hard data to demonstrate such improvement.

Nevertheless, questions about the effectiveness of instructional technology are ones that seriously need to be asked. We’re just not going to get many answers from a multiple choice test.

Now, getting back to the school board goal that was the focus of tonight’s presentation.

The reality is that most teachers in our overly-large school district already have access to many of the tech tools that can help students learn to “access, communicate, [and] apply knowledge” and which can be used to “foster creativity”.

What we lack is the curriculum, teacher training programs, and administrative support that would allow them to be used for those purposes.

However, I do love the language of the goal.

It’s language that opens the door for us, with the school board’s blessing, to encourage and support those unique teachers who are willing to experiment outside the number 2 pencil bubble.

assessment, education, school board, technology