Unit Four: Making Connections
Assessment Styles
Ideas and Concepts about Intelligence and Ability
Sociopolitical Implications of Testing
The Science of Measuring Success
Standardized
Flexible
No Child Left Behind (2001)
Lawmakers with limited understandings of the actual realities of the classroom environment/needs of the students
Denying differences in academic experience/inclination
Campbell's Law
overvaluing of test scores and conflation of test scores with intelligence means that they become untrustworthy as measures of academic success.
Forces teachers to reframe "low-performing" students as liabilities
Dangers of standardized assessments as measures of academic success
Falsified test data
Pushing "low performance" students out of school
Focus on "bubble kids"
Decrease in importance of student welfare
Narrowing of curriculum to focus on tested content
Repeated enforcement of the same processes expecting a different result
Assessment for vs. of learning
Testing as it becomes a deciding factor for post-school life (National Research Council. (1998))
Grade promotion
Reception of a diploma
Tracking
Often attempts to dictate the future careers and roles in society students will have/play
Independent oversight
Federal regulation
Deliberative forums concerning student welfare and success
Assessing the success of standardized testing
measurement validity, attribution of cause, and effectiveness of treatment (National Research Council. (1998))
Makes accountability for student success only the students
Inappropriate test use increases opportunity inequality
"The lower achievement test scores of racial and ethnic minorities and students from low-income families reflect persistent inequalities in American society and its schools, not inalterable realities about those groups of students.”
Overrepresented groups in lower-track classes: members of some minority groups, English-language learners, and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds
Often denied these things
Similar to issues in modern day segregation and tracking
"It takes a village" mentality
Behaviorist learning theory
a framework that requires a student to master skills in a certain order and be tested explicitly on each step of the process
The rhetoric of remediation
Ideas of cultural inferiority
The primitive mind (Cole, 2008)
What happens when we thing? Unique experience for everyone
Archaic language and systems
Looking for a right answer, rather than indication of learning
Belief in individualized mastery of certain skill tests through standardized testing techniques (Shepard, 2003)
"Fairness" (equality) over equity