*and about those bubble tests...
I should add that while many stories about the upcoming generation of assessments talk about supplanting fill-in-the-bubble multiple-choice tests, nothing in the applications indicated that would be the case. Well, yes, insofar as you do not fill in a bubble when you take a test online; you click on the right answer, or whatever.
What is being proposed is a combination of questions and tasks that includes written answers but also multiple-choice (or “selected-response,” as it’s formally called). The proposals promise better selected-response questions—ones that are more challenging, require more critical thinking, etc.—not a move away from them.
What is being proposed is a combination of questions and tasks that includes written answers but also multiple-choice (or “selected-response,” as it’s formally called). The proposals promise better selected-response questions—ones that are more challenging, require more critical thinking, etc.—not a move away from them.
posted by Linda Perlstein at
2:14 PM
2 Comments:
This is such an important point. The Administration is rarely questioned about its blind faith in these magical new tests, which don't actually exist anywhere.
There's only so much you can invent when you're attempting to measure reading comprehension. What we will have is similar questions based on similar passages, except the interface will be sparkly and animated.
There's also a lot of discussion about how tests will be designed to ask particular questions based on student responses, as if this is going to provide some kind of magic window into the minds of young people.
The "growth model" is going to require more time spent on test, and I'm not sure anyone's actually walked into a typical public school to count the number of working computers and compare that number against the numbers of students who must be tested with a given testing window. I'm pretty sure that even if affluent areas manage to pull off the computer-based testing cycle, the poorer schools will still be using bubble sheets for a very long time.
In the end, the testing companies are going to walk away with all of this money in return for a basically unusable product that will tell us nothing more than what we already know, which is that tests generally measure the presence of poverty, and given the right combination of coercion, reward, and drill, students can be trained to better on these tests, and that none of this has any relationship to success in life.
Also, in the end, none of this activity will remotely resemble the kind of education that affluent people choose for their children, including the President's own children, and to a slightly lesser extent, the children of the Secretary of Education. In the new blueprint, public districts with fewer poverty-related obstacles to surmount will be much less harried by the threat of sanctions than they currently are. And private schools-- well, they reject this nonsense entirely.
It's an ideological program, nothing more. -@tbfurman
Doesn't surprise me. I would expect nothing less from people like Duncan and Obama who wouldn't know progressive education if it bit them in the rear.
I have two of my own blog posts I would like to share with you.
You can't construct meaning in a preconceived bubble: http://www.joebower.org/2010/06/you-cant-construct-meaning-in.html
Why I will never give another multiple choice test again. Ever. http://www.joebower.org/2010/02/multiple-choice-tests-suck.html
Joe
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