Teach42

Hey Steve,

I’ll take a stab at this:

Just last week, I had the chance to sit down with two teachers from Denmark. In the course of our visit, they explained the final exams given to their students and it seemed like a pretty darn good system to me.

Get this: EVERY child takes an oral exam with their teacher and a “censor” from the local education governing group.

The teacher I was speaking with was an English and History teacher. His exam consisted of students speaking in English on a topic of their own choice for 15 minutes. The teacher would interject, asking questions about the topic to see if the child could adjust his conversation appropriately.

Then, the student had to pick a card from a pile prepared by the teacher. Each card had a topic studied during the school year on it. For the next fifteen minutes, the student and the teacher interacted with one another around that content/topic.

When the exam was over, the teacher and the censor worked together to judge the student’s level of mastery as compared to other students.

And to introduce a measure of accountability, ALL EXAMS are open to the general public. Anyone in the community that wanted to observe an exam—including that of their own child—-is allowed to! (The school does, however, check with the child before allowing an observation. There are some students who are open to having an observer while others buckle under the pressure of an extra set of eyes.)

What do you think?

Is this level of performance assessment possible in America?

Would the general public trust teachers and censors enough to make such a system of evaluation possible?

Is the transparency of being able to observe a child during a test a good idea, or would school systems open themselves to a wave of lawsuits from parents who disagreed with the decisions of the educators?

Could we pair similar performance assessments with a standardized test in order to ensure that more of the content was mastered and reviewed?

(Is this all too flipping expensive to even be worth talking about?!)

I guess I have more questions than answers. I just know that I want to move to Denmark!

Bill

Bill Ferriter´s most recent blog post.. Email and the Elementary Schooler. . .

Steve,

Assessement is actually a GOOD thing – it’s just the method used and the undue focus that it receives that’s the bad thing. I would love to see students create portfolios that follow them from year to year in elementary, and then from course to course in secondary.

If done correctly, portfolios require students to analyze their own work and choose the best pieces to included. Then they must write a description of the piece, an analysis of how this piece helped them learn, and then a reflection on what they could improve.

Portfolios put the accountability back on the student.

However, this does not address your question of how to assess in order to compare to others. That takes us back to some type of standard evaluation. And we are talking about evaluation rather than assessment. Assessment is considering the work’s best points and making suggestions for improvement while evaluation is putting a value on the work.

Is evaluation necessary?

Fran Bullington´s most recent blog post.. Hawk Library BookRap Contest

Steve,

Assessement is actually a GOOD thing – it’s just the method used and the undue focus that it receives that’s the bad thing. I would love to see students create portfolios that follow them from year to year in elementary, and then from course to course in secondary.

If done correctly, portfolios require students to analyze their own work and choose the best pieces to included. Then they must write a description of the piece, an analysis of how this piece helped them learn, and then a reflection on what they could improve.

Portfolios put the accountability back on the student.

However, this does not address your question of how to assess in order to compare to others. That takes us back to some type of standard evaluation. And we are talking about evaluation rather than assessment. Assessment is considering the work’s best points and making suggestions for improvement while evaluation is putting a value on the work.

Is evaluation necessary?

Assessment is a good thing, and the two examples by Fran and Bill are wonderful ways to actually see and hear what students have learned. But putting a value to those things is just too subjective. What is amazing work to me, might be just mediocre work to one of my colleagues. This is where we keep getting balled up in education. How can you truly and fairly evaluate the whole student not just what they can regurgitate from memory? I believe we need to re-train the public to look at information differently before we can assess students differently. Parents, employers and college admissions officers need to be looking for the same things we are…and right now they are just looking for numbers (or letters) that match their past experiences with what “excellence” means. I think this shift would make portfolios and oral exams (or interviews) the key to fair and accurate assessments that are also meaningful to students.

Steve-

I think that the big question is not how can we assess better, but what is what are we assessing and why we are assessing it.

I have read Richard Rothstein’s Grading Education, my initial thoughts are here http://laufenberg.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/grading-education/. This particular book takes to task the issue of accountability and how/when it went wrong. I would suggest giving a read to either Rothstein or Daniel Koretz’s Measuring Up (You can hear him speak on the history of 30 years of education here http://bigthink.com/danielkoretz/daniel-koretz-on-the-last-30-years-of-american-education).

Many people are having this conversation in a researched and deliberate manner with the hope of shifting the dialogue from assessment we can afford to assessment that is meaningful. We must do better. IMHO, these two men go a long way to pushing the conversation in a worthwhile direction. I’ll leave you with a snippet from the beginning of Grading Education…

Rothstein writes, “But first things first. Before detailing this accountability program, we have to ask, “accountable for what?” What are the goals of American public education? Certainly, good test scores are part of the answer, but should schools be accountable for more – say, good citizenship, or good judgment? If so, is it possible to measure these broader school outcomes to know whether educators are performing satisfactorily? It is to these questions that we now turn.”

Diana Laufenberg´s most recent blog post.. SLA goes to AZ/UT

One cannot ignore what we want education to do if we are going to discuss assessment.”Of course, we could easily argue over what we actually want it (our education system) to do, but ignore that for just a moment.”
For example, if our goal as educators is to produce students who can read to a certain proficiency, then the reading tests we give now are pretty good. If, instead, our goal is to produce students who can read for information, using a variety of texts and who can enjoy books, then we need to restructure the assessments for that goal. Want to create students who can collaborate well on projects? Then assess them on their collaboration skills. Want students who care about the world? Find out what they are doing to demonstrate their concern and use that as an assessment.

To separate what we want to achieve from the assessment itself is an impossibility. We’ve been trying that for years and it just doesn’t work.

Lisa Parisi´s most recent blog post.. Preparing Students for Middle School?

I am coming into this discussion a little late – spring is here and my brain took a much needed break. At any rate, here are a few of my thoughts:
I understand the need for accountability (and as mentioned above – needed to know “accountable for what”) – but if parent repeatedly brings their child to school late or picks the child up early, and the child fails “the test” – the school is held accountable. We cannot teach students who are not present. At what point do parents/guardians enter the state of accountability?
As a teacher I am not allowed to base a student’s grade on a single assessment – but isn’t that exactly what “the test” does? If a student comes to school on test day having had a fight with boyfriend/girlfriend, parent, teacher, etc. – he or she is not going to do as well as they might.
Teaching to the test has become so prevalent we are neglecting other important things that should or could be taught. Playing with Legos and building blocks goes a long way to teaching a young child cause and effect, basic gravity rules, etc – but since it isn’t directly on a test, these items are gathering dust in a closet. What happened to letting children explore?

Currently reading – Thinking about assessment – by @teach42 http://tinyurl.com/cc2u69

Steve — I am going to make it very simple for everyone to understand. (Including the dog and pet rock) States and districts have spent a lot of time developing “State Standards” — My lesson plans, daily routine, weekly routine, and year are planned around standards. I can recite the standards the district puts on the report cards from memory.

So here is my solution — Thumbs UP — Thumbs DOWN.

If you are in fourth grade and you are expected to identify the characters of a story, the genre of a story, and read at a certain reading level that is what will be expected. If your are to know how to multiply, divide, and have a general concept of fractions, then good job. Thumbs UP you go on to the next grade. Thumbs DOWN — you are in fourth grade again.

I do realize this is a basic concept. However, if you come to kindergarten knowing everything that a kindergarten student should know — Thumbs UP — no need to waste a year of your life on learning your colors and numbers — the student goes on to the next level.

Parents would realize very quickly that their child isn’t just going to be passed to the next grade level for the sake of age. There needs to be some sense of responsibility on the child’s part to move on and acquire that intrinsic desire. Our current system of testing puts the progress monitoring of the student solely on the shoulders of the teacher. And, for all I know, I could have had a student playing connect the dots that day during the standardized math test. (I was an extremely intelligent child and I have to admit I remember doing that on a standardized test one time in sixth grade.)

Adria Carter — who is now working on an Ed.D.and no longer connecting dots.

I disagree with your statement that NCLB is bad. Just like everything else, not all is bad there are actually some good parts. NCLB and assessments actually are allowing some students who would never have thought about taking some courses take the class. For example, for years students had a choice about taking Algebra, some students were not recommended by their teachers so therefore never got the chance. Obviously, they could have taken the course, but because they we’re not recommended they felt they couldn’t handle the subject. (I’m showing my age here.) Now, because of NCLB all students take Algebra. As educators, we can no longer discriminate against students because we don’t think they can handle the course.
On the topic of assessment, I’m torn. I really do not feel that assessments should be use to determine if students graduate, but I do feel that assessments have a purpose. Assessments, if used correctly, help schools/teachers to determine if their students are making progress and where changes may need to be made within the curriculum. The problem is most people don’t use assessments correctly. We see assessments as a tool for grading and not a tool for change. (At the high school level, about the only way to have students take assessments seriously is if they have a grade associated with it.)

Terry: Just to clarify, I think NCLB was well-intentioned, but the implementation of it was/is awful. It could have been something that really benefited education, but instead it became very punitive and did more to restrict good teaching than promote it.

Adriana: While personally i can jump on board with that idea, the problem is that it will be rather difficult to ascertain how schools are doing overall, or how to compare students for the sake of college applications and such. While that may work on an individual level, I’m just not sure it would handle things nationally.

Regardless, I appreciate the input!

Steve: I agree that NCLB was well-intentioned, but I don’t think it was necessary as an *unfunded federal mandate*. Our education system would have been better served if NCLB was just a set of guidelines that schools could follow if they were unable to develop viable monitoring system of their own. I believe that many schools, if left to their own devices, would and could have developed much better programs than what the NCLB ended up being. NCLB simply fosters an environment of mediocrity, especially for high-achievers. Teachers end up teaching to the test and no actual learning is involved.

Some schools have begun to explore other learning methods within the framework of NCLB (e.g. expeditionary learning), but until there is a fundamental shift in thinking, our educational system won’t improve. I would suggest more privatization and specialization (to a point) of schools and a departure from ‘lock-step’ progression through the system.

Troy´s most recent blog post.. The Importance of Being Prepared

I am not agree with your statements. It is too bad.