{"id":781,"date":"2006-11-22T13:11:08","date_gmt":"2006-11-22T17:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=781"},"modified":"2006-11-22T13:11:08","modified_gmt":"2006-11-22T17:11:08","slug":"more-on-teaching-to-the-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=781","title":{"rendered":"More on teaching to the test"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jal Mehta (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eduwonk.com\/archives\/2006_11_19_archive.html#116420649520778976\">guest blogger for Eduwonk<\/a>) continues the blogule discussion of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000717.html\">teaching to the test<\/a> with a lament about the inability to follow through on the New Standards Project desire for high-quality tests that were not easily susceptible to test-prep.<br \/>\nFor some reason, this strikes me as very similar to the laments I hear about the death of trolleys in mid-20th century L.A., except that nostalgia for the heady days of the early 90s seems, well, a bit misplaced.  For that matter, so is the nostalgia for the Red Cars, which were geared as much to opening up the San Fernando Valley (see a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usc.edu\/libraries\/archives\/la\/historic\/redcars\/redcar_map.jpeg\">system map<\/a> from 1910) as to mass transit, and probably more geared towards speculative land development.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<hr width=\"25%\">\nThere are a few things that are important about the proposal to create demanding performance tests:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When tried, performance tests have been expensive, and the psychometric qualities controversial, to say the least.\n<li>Very quickly, states figured out they could &#8216;hybridize&#8217; the idea (to use Larry Cuban&#8217;s expression) by incorporating some performance items in a test that would remain mostly multiple-choice, satisfying the demand for some performance items while lowering the cost and the statistical problems (in the eyes of such officials); here, Florida was a leader.\n<li>Where it was tried more extensively, it&#8217;s unclear to see how the existence of performance tasks dramatically changed the dynamics of high-stakes systems. Of the states that tried performance items, one was killed for political reasons (in California). The history of Kentucky&#8217;s KIRIS system gets read in many different ways, but that was a substantial package of reforms, where pulling out the test format and other characteristics is hard to justify, analytically.\n<li>The proposal for demanding performance assessments demonstrates that focusing on tests puts the cart before the horse. Suppose we established a mandatory history test in Florida that would be essay-based.  Take any item in the national history standards (which are essentially essay prompts), and make a student write on that for an hour.  (<a href=\"http:\/\/nchs.ucla.edu\/standards\/era8-5-12.html#D\">Example<\/a>: <em>Evaluate how minorities organized to gain access to wartime jobs in WW2 and how they confronted discrimination.<\/em>) That&#8217;s meaningful and demanding, and getting students to the point where they could succeed on such a task might require most of a decade in terms of changing the curriculum, textbooks, and history-class routines. But the sequence that Tucker and Resnick suggested would bollix that up&#151;we are so focused on short-term changes in test results that everyone would assume that lousy scores for several years means that history teachers aren&#8217;t changing things, even if there&#8217;s a deliberate effort to change practices.  <\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;d love to believe the New Standards theory of action, because it&#8217;s comforting to think that <em>we just have to craft the right test<\/em>. Nor am I saying that we should be happy with what currently exists! But I&#8217;m afraid the New Standards story is a bit of a fairy tale. You can&#8217;t just tweak the test and expect the rest to follow.<br \/>\nAll right: enough procrastinating.  Time to get back to the last chapter and describe how we can save the world&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jal Mehta (guest blogger for Eduwonk) continues the blogule discussion of teaching to the test with a lament about the inability to follow through on the New Standards Project desire for high-quality tests that were not easily susceptible to test-prep. For some reason, this strikes me as very similar to the laments I hear about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-cB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}