Talking to Your Community About Test Scores
For many parents, making sense out of their child’s test scores is like trying to understand the tax code. They know they have to deal with it; they just don’t want to. To market your schools effectively, you need to find ways to talk about test scores that don’t make parents feel like they need a doctoral degree or a foreign language translator.
January 2008
Testing and Assessment Terms You Need to Know
Do data and assessment terms confuse you? Can you tell the difference between a norm- and a criterion-referenced test? What are benchmark data and why are they so important? What are school abilities tests? What is Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)? As your curriculum team clicks through these various phrases, are your eyes starting to roll up in the back of your head? Don’t worry; you are not alone.
January 2008
What's Being Said About NCLB?
The No Child Left Behind Act is scheduled for congressional reauthorization this year. Exactly when Congress and the president will sign on the dotted line is uncertain, and some officials speculate a vote on NCLB will be postponed until after the 2008 elections. But that uncertainty hasn’t slowed a storm of reports, hearings, and intense lobbying seeking to modify the five-year-old law.
May 2007
Technology and Program Evaluation
With public and legislative attention focused on education accountability, the role of program evaluation is more important than ever. New tools have made the program evaluator's job easier in many ways—and harder in others.
January 2007
Assessments: A Brave New World
Technology-enhanced tracking of test scores can help your district meet its achievement goals.
January 2007
NCLB—Act II
There’s never been a shortage of opinions about NCLB. And now that the law is up for reauthorization this year, both critics and supporters are laying the groundwork for one of the most important congressional debates about public education in years. As Congress prepares to reauthorize the landmark education law, critics and supporters are waiting in line to have their say.
January 2007
Multiple Choice
When it comes to assessment, special populations might need special accommodations. With participation in state assessments at historic levels for students with special needs, it appears that education has jumped light years ahead. But those gains cannot be considered meaningful when many of the instruments used to measure subject mastery are stuck in the dark ages. Standardized tests always leave some students at a disadvantage, but this is especially true for those who learn differently.
January 2006
Test Anxiety
Where should you draw the line between normal trepidation and genuine test anxiety? Students with true test anxiety tend to be consumed with worries, such as fear of failure, worthlessness, and dread. In turn, they experience physiological symptoms, such as sweating, dizziness, and racing heartbeats. Some have more traumatic symptoms. Some teachers ridicule the notion of test anxiety, but other teachers believe it's worth a little extra time and effort to help stressed-out kids calm down before exams.
June 2005
The Limits of Testing
There are two reasons why even the most reliable test score differences tell an incomplete and often inaccurate story about black-white differences in school outcomes. First, standardized tests do not measure nonacademic traits that we want young people to gain from education. Second, standardized tests themselves can give inaccurate or misleading information about performance in academic areas. Standardized tests are fine for some purposes, but they can't assess creativity, insight, or many other important traits.
February 2005
Acing the Exam
Intent on getting into colleges and universities, students nationwide are flocking to online courses and test-prep centers marketed by Princeton Review, Sylvan, Peterson's, Kaplan, and other companies. Course content varies, but most focus on test-taking strategies and skills related to writing and grammar, critical reading, and advanced algebra. Test prep is a booming industry, but is it the right way to prepare kids for college admissions exams? Maybe, maybe not.
January 2005
Curriculum Matters
What a curriculum contains has historically had far less impact on instructional practice than is widely thought. But curriculum's modest influence on instruction has been dramatically transformed in the past few years, especially with respect to state-sanctioned curricula. These days, a state's curricular aims can have a decisive impact on the way students are taught. If we really care what kids learn, curriculum should drive testing—not the other way around.
November 2004
Measuring What Matters
When the history books are written, “value-added assessment” will be understood as a revolutionary breakthrough—one that gave educators a powerful diagnostic tool for measuring the effect of pedagogy, curricula, and professional development on academic achievement and gave K-12 education a fair and accurate foundation on which to build a new system of accountability.
February 2004
Simpson's Paradox and Other Statistical Mysteries
Making sense of misleading testing trends. Simpson's Paradox is a phenomenon in which subgroups show one trend and the aggregate of all subgroups show another. In other words, what is true for the parts is not necessarily true for the whole; hence the paradox. In standardized testing, the paradox crops up when you try to calculate national average scores for both the SAT and NAEP.
February 2004
Trouble with Testing
Standards-based assessment really sounds quite wonderful. Yet, in most educational settings, it is a flat-out fraud. Any sort of beneath-the-surface look at today's standards-based assessment will soon reveal that this alluringly labeled breed of testing is simply loaded with artifice. Standards-based tests typically don't measure the skills and knowledge they purport to measure. They also don't, as is claimed, help educators do a better instructional job. Standards-based assessment, clearly, is not what it pretends.
February 2003
High Stakes, High Risk
As most of us know by now, the No Child Left Behind Act mandates a massive increase in state assessments, which mostly means standardized tests. We also know that the stakes attached to those tests are high. It would be worth enduring these difficulties if we could be reasonably sure that the test-driven changes would produce improved learning opportunities and outcomes. Unfortunately, evidence and reason argue they will not.
February 2003
Too Soon to Test
It's a rite of passage: Parents start calling in September to ask about preparing their 4- and 5-year-olds for kindergarten screening in the spring. Kindergarten screenings aren't always what they seem—or what they should be. Many schools are replacing developmental screening with readiness screening. Especially troubling is the fact that the most commonly used standardized screening instruments are not psychometrically sound and do not accurately predict students' success in the early grades.
January 2003
Data to Count On
Are your students improving? By asking this simple question, the accountability movement is compelling schools to look at student achievement. As state and federal governments set specific benchmarks for achievement, schools must find ways to meet those benchmarks and show growth in concrete, measurable ways.
January 2003
Right Task, Wrong Tool
Most Americans, and that includes school board members, believe the best way to evaluate a school is to see how well its students perform on a standardized achievement test. Despite the pervasiveness of this belief, however, it is quite wrong.
February 2002
A Measure of Knowledge
Tests can tell us what students know, but they have their limits. Standardized tests have become so important in recent years that we clearly need to understand them better. These tests have their good side and their bad. In American education's standardized testing culture, the better we understand these tests, the better we'll be able to use them and the information they give us.
February 2002