Standardized Testing

New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test

The Onion  News • education • News • ISSUE 51•07 • Feb 19, 2015 

WASHINGTON—Citing the need to measure student achievement as its top priority, the U.S. Department of Education launched a new initiative Thursday to replace the nation’s entire K-12 curriculum with a single standardized test.

According to government officials, the four-hour-long Universal Education Assessment will be used in every public school across the country, will contain identical questions for every student based on material appropriate for kindergarten through 12th grade, and will permanently take the place of more traditional methods such as classroom instruction and homework assignments.

“By administering one uniform test to our nation’s 50 million students, we can ensure that every child is evaluated by the exact same standard, regardless of background, age, or grade level,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, explaining that students will be able to take the test at any time between age 5 and 18. “It’s absolutely crucial for us to know where our kids stand, and eliminating the teaching model will provide us with the most affordable and efficient means of measuring student proficiency.”

“There is no better way to ensure consistency in America’s schools,” Duncan added.

The new test will reportedly cover all topics formerly taught in K-12 classrooms, including algebra, World War I, cursive penmanship, pre-algebra, state capitals, biology, letters of the alphabet, environmental science, civics, French, Newtonian mechanics, parts of speech, and the Cold War. Sources said students will also be expected to demonstrate their knowledge of 19th-century American pioneer life, photosynthesis, and telling time.

“By doing away with the overly complex program of full-length school days and lessons stretched out over 13 academic years, we can concentrate on increasing the reliability of our data and determine just how each student stacks up,” said Patrick Herlihy, an education researcher who helped design the test. “This is the best, most comprehensive way yet of holding our schools accountable.”
“This initiative also has the potential to help level the playing field,” Herlihy continued. “Kids in Mississippi, for example, will have literally the exact same educational opportunities as kids in Massachusetts.”

Officials confirmed the test will consist mostly of multiple-choice questions, though it will also include an essay section in which students will be able to choose from one of several prompts, ranging from “Describe the American system of federalism,” to “If I could be any animal in the world, I would be a…,” to “Write a book report on Lois Lowry’s The Giver.”

Jeff Escudero, a 10-year-old from Winamac, IN who plans to take the test and hopefully complete his primary and secondary education next month, admitted to reporters that the new standardized exam was a source of stress for him.

“There’s a lot riding on this,” Escudero said. “Still, I think I’m pretty set. I just have to learn the periodic table, be able to explain what triangular trade is, and remember that it goes egg, larva, pupa, butterfly. It’ll be hard answering all those questions about Richard III and the New Deal, but at least I’ve already got the numbers up to 20 totally memorized. And once I’m done with the test, I won’t have to go to school anymore.”

Officials said the initiative would also focus on improving teacher performance by tying teachers’ salaries to the test scores of the students they hand the assessment to.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-education-initiative-replaces-k12-curriculum-w,38048/

Failing is Good. Really.

Have you read “Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing” from last Sunday's NY Times magazine section?  If so, I would be interested in knowing what you thought of it. If not, it’s definitely worth a look.  According to author Benedict Carey,  

Across a variety of experiments, psychologists have found that, in some circumstances, wrong answers on a pretest aren’t merely useless guesses. Rather, the attempts themselves change how we think about and store the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we benefit from answering incorrectly by, in effect, priming our brain for what’s coming later.

That is: The (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. We fail, but we fail forward.

The excitement around prefinals is rooted in the fact that the tests appear to improve subsequent performance in topics that are not already familiar. … A just-completed study — the first of its kind, carried out by the U.C.L.A. psychologist Elizabeth Ligon Bjork — found that in a live classroom of Bjork’s own students, pretesting raised performance on final-exam questions by an average of 10 percent compared with a control group.

The basic insight is as powerful as it is surprising: Testing might be the key to studying, rather than the other way around. As it turns out, a test is not only a measurement tool. It’s a way of enriching and altering memory.

The theory emerging suggests that pretesting, at least when followed by prompt feedback on the issues covered, “primes the brain,” making it more apt to absorb new information, and the test “becomes an introduction to what students should learn, rather than a final judgment on what they did not.”

What is your philosophy on testing?  Do you use pre-testing at all? Why, how, why  not? 

What is Praxis and how can every department help our students pass it?

Guest Blogger: Emery Petchauer

Praxis I is the common name for the Pre-Professional Skills Test (PPST) or teacher licensure test(s) that all students in Pennsylvania must take in order to become certificated teachers. Not only must students pass it to become licensed teachers, they must pass it (i.e., a reading, writing, and math test at roughly 8th grade content—approximately 40 questions each) before they can declare education as a major. Thus, education is a major that students must test into. This gatekeeper position of the exam is not because it identifies students who hold promise as effective educators; rather, the position is due to program accreditation demands set by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (as it the 3.0 minimum GPA requirement)

At time of this writing, there are 41 students enrolled on the main campus who have passed Praxis I. Some of these students passed all three parts on their first attempt, and some passed on multiple attempts. There are approximately 25 more students who have passed different combinations of the three required sub-tests and are working toward passing all of Praxis I. This number of passing students has increased since the education department centralized our preparation efforts in 2007 by creating the Praxis Cohort tutorial, and these efforts are modified each year to continually improve our program.

Despite these improvements and efforts, passing Praxis remains a significant challenge for many of our students and is the most common reason students change majors or are counseled to do so. This difficulty in passing Praxis is due to (a) some inadequate high school educations, (b) previous failure experiences with standardized tests, (c) the cultural and social class bias of such tests, and (d) misinformation about the test, which creates cognitive and affective dispositions that decrease the likelihood of passing (i.e., the ideas that “nobody” passes the test).

Since Lincoln University holds accredited teaching programs in many secondary fields (e.g., mathematics, biology, English, Spanish, history and social studies, etc.), each school on campus graduates teachers. In this way, each school can be a part of successfully preparing our students to pass Praxis by content and disposition. Preparation in terms of content is rather straightforward in that some classes in the mathematics, English and mass communications, and education departments (and thus our three schools) connect most directly with the three areas of Praxis I. The second area, dispositions, I believe is equally important and is more relevant to every department on campus.

What people believe about their capabilities on specific tasks significantly shapes the decisions they make, how much effort they exert, how much they persistence through obstacles, how much stress and affective burden they experience, and their perceptions of accomplishment. Beliefs, in fact, are often more important to motivation and affective states than what is objectively true. These points come from the extensive body of research on self-efficacy ala Albert Bandura (1997). Self-efficacy is shaped by four information sources: previous mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal and social persuasion, and physiological states.

What all of this means to every department on campus is that by giving students vicarious successful experiences (e.g., highlighting the successful experiences of students “just like them”), and by giving students positive verbal and social persuasion about Praxis related skills (e.g., “I’ve seen your writing in class, and I think you will pass Praxis writing), professors play an integral roll in helping improve students’ Praxis efficacy. Similarly, being careful not to talk about the test and testing experiences in ways that decrease self-efficacy (e.g., “Lincoln students don’t do well on Praxis”) helps our students pass.

Here are some other factual pieces of information that you can easily tell students when the topic of Praxis comes up:

• People just like you pass Praxis all the time
  
• Some people pass the first time they take it; some have to study to pass
  
• There are over 40 students on campus right now who have passed all parts of Praxis
  
• One students last year missed only 1 question on the math test
  
• Another student’s math score improved 13 points (out of 40) after studying for the math test for 8 weeks
  
• You only have to get about 55% correct to pass—not 100%

Here are some things to avoid saying because they will likely decrease self-efficacy and/or they are not true:

• African American students do not perform well on standardized tests
• Lincoln students don’t to well on Praxis
• You can’t really study for Praxis
• I was never good at tests like that

Related Resources:

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of self control. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Bennett, C. I., McWhorter, L. M., & Kuykendall, J. A. (2006). Will I ever teach? Latino and African American students’ perceptions on PRAXIS I. American Educational Research Journal, 43, 531-575.

Goldhaber, D., & Hansen, M. (2010). Race, gender, and teacher testing: How informative a tool is teacher licensure testing? American Educational Research Journal, 47, 218-251.

www.ets.org/praxis