Comments on: Data

By: Doug Noon

Doug Noon — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 01:45:07 +0000

Michael, what you have to say about Australia’s Northern Territory sounds very similar to issues faced by Alaska’s rural schools. I’ve never taught in the bush, and most of what I know about working there comes from stories told by teachers I’ve met in university professional development courses, or who’ve relocated to the “urban” area I work in. Turnover in the bush schools is high. A large percentage are staffed by people recruited from outside the state. Packaged curriculum solutions are increasingly relied on to raise standardized test scores. The best bet, I think, is to encourage local involvement and to recruit as many teachers from rural communities as we can. Outside solutions don’t seem to work very well. As you say, they’re mostly political and don’t address the real problems.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:45:34 +0000

For whom do you collect data? If it’s, as you say, to enable you to work directly with your students on what they need to work on and it becomes a collaborative and constructive exercise, then there’s some purpose to it . But there seems to be a tendency to collect data for education bureaucrats who first use it to justify their positions, then feed it to the politicians, who then engage across jurisdictions in a glorified pissing contest. And sometimes, of course, it’s used to denigrate the public education system.
In Australia, for instance, every primary school kid sits a series of national ‘benchmarking’ tests in numeracy, reading and writing at years 3, 5 and 7 (corresponding to ages 8, 10 and 12) - the Multilevel Assessment program (MAP) tests. To no-one’s surprise, national results show the Northern Territory has a lower percentage of kids reaching or exceeding the benchmark. The data shows that kids in remote schools, in other words Aboriginal kids, are getting the lowest scores of all - say less than 40 per cent achieving the bencmark - and that’s dragging the overall percentage down.
Now it seems to me the first question we should be asking - given that teaching in remote shools is dealing with education across cultures - is whether what the way they are doing that is appropriate. I’m not talking about ‘learning styles’, which is usually a euphemism used by people who parade cultural differences as the reason/excuse for Aboriginal kids not doing so well. What I’m talking about is schools being properly resourced, pedadgogies being appropriate for the context, teachers being properly trained for the task - not just a few Professional Development days here and there - and living and working in conditions that give them some reason for staying, learning and growing, as well as properly educating the kids.
Instead the bureaucrats feed the line that the data also shows poor attendance in these schools (again, we should be asking why). So the answer to the lower percentages is reduced ad absurdam to attendance. If we fix attendance, then we fix the problem.
Then you get a rave about how many dollars are going into remote education, which must be proof of the government’s bona fides. Not much about what the’re actually doing with the dollars. Or why. I think we shouldn’t be emphasising the quantities, unless we can talk qualitatively about the what, how and why. And then do something.

By: readerdiane

readerdiane — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:43:48 +0000

I have been teaching long enough that I was on a committee when we had nationally normed tests. We changed to benchmark tests. I have always used my own test because I didn’t find the benchmark results to be accurate with what I saw.

I just heard that we might add a nationally normed test to the array of tests we are doing. Ugh!

By: Jude

Jude — Thu, 24 May 2007 05:10:35 +0000

We had AR at our high school, so we bought STAR reading to complement it. It worked best with the SPED kids. As a librarian, I worked really hard with one kid on comprehension–we read together each day during my lunch half hour, and each day we went over what had just happened and what happened in the chapters before. It was a relief for me to find out that he read at a third grade level, because it made sense why he couldn’t comprehend a fourth grade book. I tested myself and my kids (then in 5th and 6th grades) using Star reading, just for fun. We all tested at the highest level possible. I tried to use those scores (along with their other test scores) to convince their teachers that perhaps these two particular kids didn’t really need to fill out a stupid reading log (the bane of a mother’s existence), but of course, that didn’t work–all children must fill out meaningless reading logs because it shows us, the teachers, that children can fill out reading logs and forge their parents’ signatures. Anyway, use the tests if they help, and ignore them if they don’t–oh, wait, with NCLB we can’t exactly do that, can we?

By: Brian Crosby

Brian Crosby — Thu, 24 May 2007 03:29:25 +0000

Doug - beyond the ITBS and CRT’s and DRA’s and OSI’s and math and reading formative assessments (and more) that we give at my school, we do the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) 4 times a year. What is interesting about the SRI is that it is easy to administer - it is server based so students take it in the computer lab in 15 to 30 minutes as a whole class - fairly painless. The results are what is interesting. When results are printed out you can choose to see the results from everytime that student has taken the SRI even in past years. So it is always interesting that 2 to 5 or so students will score significantly lower than usual, sometimes 2 or 3 grade levels below their last several scores … um probably this student didn’t lose reading ability … so we share that information with the student - they sometimes have a confused look and other times they share that they were distracted, tired, not feeling great, mad about something that happened at home or recess or ….
We have them retake the test (they don’t read the same passages and aren’t asked the same questions) and guess what???? SURPRISE!!!! 90% of the time their score not only goes up … it is the highest score they ever had. You think it has something to do with focus and being motivated to do their best? What does that have to say about test scores when they only get one chance no matter what has been going on in their lives?
Just a thought.
We have 2 weeks left … but when you are already back … we won’t be : )
Brian