Categories
Archives by date
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
A bookstore provides the secret to standardized testing
I’ve been working today in the air-conditioned comfort of a bookstore café, eating and drinking my way through the next few pages. My task today: finish the description of standardized test characteristics key to accountability. Two of them—comparability and consistency—set the stage for test preparation. Because tests sort students either explicitly or implicitly, and because […]
Making sense of expertise
I’m back to rolling on the book today—deleted some outline stuff, but I added about 5-6 pages, the organization is much more clear (I hope!), and I know much more clearly where I’m going with the rest of the chapter. Most of what I added today concerned the birth of a testing industry as part […]
The politics of composite scales
The logjam is gone now, at least for chapter 2, thanks to a discussion with a classroom teacher (my wife). Talking the ideas over last night made me realize I had been dancing around the central dilemma of relying on tests: The same qualities that satisfy technical requirements for psychometrics distance us from knowing concretely […]
John Kingdon and accountability
John Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (1984) is now a classic in political science and policy analysis, arguing that issues attain policy salience when the streams of publicly-recognized problems, policy solutions, and politics intersect. My colleagues Larry Johnson and Kathy Borman used Kingdon’s framework to analyze higher-ed politics in Florida (and the temporary absence […]
Testing as technology
I’ve spent my book-time today pondering the nature of testing as technology. For the first time, I’m using concept-mapping software (CMAP), because, well, I haven’t been able to get my mind to think about this rigorously, and anything’s worth a shot. So it’s been fruitful. One thought in my head before today, which I knew […]