PROFILES AND ASSESSMENTS

Intriguing!

A Superintendent of a local school district was quoted in the newspaper stating "As a district and as a community, we must begin to define what we believe a successful school and a successful graduate looks like. We must look for measures beyond state test scores to show that we are moving in the right direction."

I wondered if he was thinking along the lines of those in Nebraska http://www.elladvocates.org/media/NCLB/Time30may07.html or North Carolina http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/graduationproject/ who determined what the profile of 21st century citizen should be and then devised processes to educate and assess students as the attain those skills. (For an excellent description of what North Carolina is doing, peruse the Watauga High School site http://www.watauga.k12.nc.us/graduation_project/index.html .)

What he meant instead was to use available data, such as the number of students taking AP classes, numbers in the gifted program, etc. in order to flesh out a more complete profile of what students in the district are like.

Oh well.

Multiple Choice Learning

Rebecca, my granddaughter attends a high school located in a Chicago suburb. A few nights ago she was relating to us what was going on in her classes. She mentioned that, in a particular class, her grade should have been higher because the test she took wasn’t scored right. She said that she had changed an answer on her Scantron machine-scored multiple choice answer sheet, but it had been marked wrong just the same by the machine because, the teacher said, “You didn’t use a good enough eraser.”

I asked Rebecca how many of the teachers used Scantron sheets in testing and she responded “All the quizzes and tests in every class except for math are given using the Scantron.” She continued “Except for Finals Exams - We get to write an essay along with doing the Scantron sheets.” One of her teachers even gave her class “a tour of the Scantron room” once to show how her tests were graded. My granddaughter, who wants to be a teacher, was much impressed.

Rebecca said using these kinds of tests by all her teachers was done to get students ready to take the ACT tests. As background, the ACTs are a major component of the Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE) given to all 11th graders in Illinois. The PSAE is the NCLB high school component in Illinois. The PSAE includes three components; the one that is reported most in newspapers are the ACT battery of four multiple-choice tests (English, mathematics, reading, and science). The other major NCLB test in Illinois called the Illinois Standards Achievement Test is also composed of multiple choice tests. There is a writing component to both tests, but only limited ones.

On a related note, this morning I caught David Martin, the CBS News' National Security Correspondent, on C-Span discussing his job. He said that trying to find the truth was a “messy” thing as he described various approaches he uses to discover what he “approximates to be the truth” in an issue.

If the issues of the world refuse to be classified into neat little boxes and stay messy, then perhaps we can teach students that sometimes there is no one correct answer. We can teach our students that the choices they make must relate to all the issues, perspectives, needs, facts, and theories related to the problems faced, and to possible consequences of actions they must consider doing. We can teach our students to contribute solutions to problems through collaborative communities. We can help them to learn for themselves through developing a culture of learning in schools that is not irrelevant to the real world.

However, if students are continued to be tested in ways that describe thinking reflected by multiple choice tests, I pray that the world changes so that all the problems are no longer “messy”. In this kind of world, the biggest issues Rebecca and all other young adults face would be to have sharp pencils and good enough erasers.

Image Copyright Daryl Cargel; used with permission