Date sent: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 02:19:41 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: Teaching to the test - Tucker1


>Subject: Teaching to the test - Tucker1
>
>July 13, 1994
> 
>Teaching To The Test
> By
>Debra Viadero
>Nine-year-old Brianna Stump of Nicholasville, Ky., spent more than a month
>putting
>together a portfolio of the best language-arts work she produced in 4th
>grade. These are a
>few of the items she included: an imaginary magazine interview with Harriet
>Tubman, a
>reading log, an audiotape of a speech she prepared for her 4-H group, an
>essay discussing
>examples of friendship in the novel Charlotte's Web, and colorfully crayoned
>book jackets.
>Now, in a hotel ballroom hundreds of miles away in Albuquerque, N.M.,
>teachers who
>have never met Brianna are looking at her work and assessing it.
>"I think this demonstrates a thorough understanding,'' says one Oregon
>educator.
>"She has focus, she's expressive, and she has a voice,'' adds a teacher from
>New York
>State. "She has details that are rich and complex, and she's sensitive to her
>audience.''
>"She's a '4,''' the second teacher concludes and the first teacher nods in
>agreement.
>If Brianna were there to hear it, she would be flattered. On this grading
>scale, "4'' means
>Brianna has demonstrated "accomplished'' work that meets the standard these
>teachers
>expect for her grade level.
>More remarkable than the score itself, however, is that so many of the
>teachers gathered
>together from so many different school districts could agree on it. Yes, they
>collectively
>decided, this is what we mean by meeting the standard for 4th-grade student
>work in
>language arts.
>Scenes like this are what the New Standards Project, which convened the
>teachers in May,
>is all about--coming to agreement on what kind of work is "good enough.''
>Begun in 1991, the project is a joint effort of the National Center on
>Education and the
>Economy, a Rochester, N.Y.-based policy-development organization that seeks
>to upgrade
>the U.S. education and training system, and the University of Pittsburgh's
>Learning
>Research and Development Center. Its ambition is to take a common set of
>rigorous
>academic standards for what students should know and be able to do and
>develop a
>national system of student assessments based on those standards.
>Accomplishing that means that educators from all over the country, teachers
>like the ones
>poring over Brianna Stump's portfolio, must agree on what is worth teaching
>and how to
>tell when students have mastered it.
>To aid in that undertaking, New Standards has recruited 18 states and six
>school districts
>as partners. They include some of the largest states, such as California,
>Texas, and New
>York, as well as some of the smallest, such as Delaware. The school districts
>span the
>nation, from New York City to San Diego.
>Altogether, those states and districts enroll more than half the nation's
>schoolchildren.
>The entire effort to date has cost $16.4 million in private foundation funds
>and in
>contributions from the partner states.
>All of which makes the New Standards Project arguably the most complex and
>ambitious
>school-reform effort in this century.
>Three years into its work, the project is still years away from achieving its
>goal. But if
>those efforts pay off and a national system of examinations emerges, the
>project could go a
>long way toward transforming the teaching and learning that goes on in
>classrooms
>nationwide.
>"If we can agree on national standards for student achievement and create
>conditions all
>over the country in which those standards are internalized and made the
>centerpiece of
>educators' and students' efforts,'' writes Lauren B. Resnick, the project's
>co-founder, "there
>is a good probability that curriculum, professional development, textbooks,
>and eventually,
>teacher preparation can be changed so the entire system is working toward the
>standards.''
>Marc, Ana, Julia, and Daniel decide to have a checkers tournament at school.
>They want to
>be sure that each of them gets a chance to play each of the others one time.
>They ask you
>to make a schedule for the tournament. Here is the information you need to
>make a plan
>that works:
>
>They want to finish the tournament in one week. They can play from Monday to
>Friday.
>
>They will play only at lunchtime. There is enough time during lunch period to
>play one
>game of checkers.
>
>The students have two checkers sets, so two games can be going on at once.
>
>Marc can't play checkers on the days he is a lunch helper (Mondays and
>Wednesdays).
>
>Each player must play every other player once.
>Make a schedule for the tournament.
>This problem, included in a pilot-test the project gave last spring to 1,000
>4th graders in
>18 states, is the kind of task that New Standards proponents have in mind
>when they
>talk about transforming schooling in America. While it draws on some basic
>mathematical skills, it also requires much more of students. It asks them to
>think deeply,
>to solve problems, and to reason and communicate their reasoning to others.
>Such problems--termed "performance tasks''--make up one-third of what the New
>Standards Project calls the "3 P's'' of its brand of assessment: performance
>tasks,
>projects, and portfolios.
>These are all assessment formats that, like science fairs and Boy Scout
>badges, allow
>students to demonstrate what they can do with what they know.
>And portfolios like Brianna Stump's, which might include performance tasks
>and
>projects as well, are expected to be the heart of New Standards. Students
>could one day
>be asked to put together these portfolios in every subject area in which the
>project is
>working: mathematics, language arts, science, and applied learning, a
>category that
>includes more generic, workplace-oriented skills.
>One point, however, is clear: The assessment systems the New Standards
>Project
>designs will not be based on standardized, fill-in-the-bubble multiple-choice
>tests.
>Such tests are reliable and were well suited to the mass-manufacturing
>economy that
>grew up in this country in the early 1900's, Resnick says, but they don't
>work anymore.
>Part of the problem with those tests was that they tended to dictate the
>curriculum
>taught in schools.
>"You get what you test,'' Resnick says, and traditionally what has been
>tested in
>schools has been low-level skills and facts-based knowledge.
>That kind of learning prepared workers well enough for factory work that
>called for
>breaking complex jobs into simple rote tasks.
>But to be competitive in the next century, the United States will demand more
>of its
>workers. In new, high-performance workplaces, Resnick writes, "individuals
>will have to
>think their way through their workdays--analyzing problems, proposing
>solutions,
>trouble-shooting and repairing equipment, communicating with others, and
>managing
>resources of time and materials.''
>Moreover, educators believe that traditional paper-and-pencil tasks do not
>reflect the
>full range of what can be taught.
>And, to students, they convey a dangerous message.
>"Kids who start out scoring high don't feel they need to work that hard,''
>Resnick says.
>"But the worst effect is on kids who start out low. They feel there is a very
>low
>likelihood they will ever make it to the top, and that sense of hopelessness
>is built right
>into the tests.''
>"The pious wish that teachers wouldn't teach to tests is nonsensical,'' she
>adds.
>"People want to do what counts.''
>Therefore, the aim of New Standards is to make thinking, problem-solving, and
>communicating skills "count'' by creating and fostering assessments designed
>to elicit
>them. The idea, in other words, is to put in place tests worth teaching to.
>And, like growing numbers of policymakers in states nationwide, New Standards
>leaders have concluded that performance-based assessment measures are key to
>achieving that end.
>However, developing a performance-based examination system on a large scale
>is an
>extraordinarily complicated endeavor and one that is fraught with potential
>minefields.
>"Because performance assessments are very time-intensive, you're investing
>more risk,''
>notes Eva L. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation,
>Standards,
>and Testing at the University of California at Los Angeles. The longer the
>tasks take,
>the fewer the tasks that can be administered in a single exam. And the fewer
>the tasks,
>the smaller the base on which to judge whether the scores are valid and
>reliable.
>Also, says Daniel M. Koretz, a resident scholar at the RAND Corporation's
>Institute on
>Education and Training in Washington, D.C., "when you give kids a really
>complex
>task, performance on one task doesn't necessarily generalize to the next.''
>Moreover, judgments on student responses to these kinds of test items can be
>highly
>subjective. Two scorers scoring the same piece of student work may not always
>match
>up the way they can with short-answer and multiple-choice test items.
>These technical questions are underscored by the fact that the states taking
>part in the
>New Standards Project have very different goals for their own student-testing
>systems.
>For example, Kentucky is planning to use results from its student-assessment
>system
>as a basis for financially rewarding or punishing schools. Other states use
>their scores
>to provide instructional feedback for districts and schools.
>Another partner state, Oregon, has laid plans to someday use portfolios of
>student
>work as a basis for awarding high school diplomas.
>That kind of variation troubles some critics. They fear that states will
>embrace New
>Standards assessments before they have been completely proven and use them to
>make decisions that could determine the course of a school's or an
>individual's
>future--purposes for which they might never have been intended.
>"There's a whole slew of studies on how the attachment of stakes leads to
>greater
>placement rates of children in special-education classrooms and leads schools
>of
>choice to refuse educationally needy students,'' says Linda Darling-Hammond,
>the
>co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and
>Teaching
>at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a critic of the New Standards
>effort.
>For now, though, that question is somewhat moot. The 18 partner states have
>agreed
>not to use the new assessments as a basis for awarding diplomas unless they
>can
>prove that all students have had a "fair shot'' at learning the material
>that's tested.
>What will happen in the future--and how states can demonstrate their students
>have
>had that fair shot--is less clear. For now, New Standards is still primarily
>a
>research-and-development effort.
>"It's allowing us safe tryouts of the issues and problems that we're unable
>to
>accomplish in a real political state,'' Baker says.
>But the questions raised are big ones. And the extent to which New Standards
>can
>satisfactorily answer its critics will have much to do with its ultimate
>success or failure.
>Such issues did not loom quite so large four years ago when Resnick and Marc
>S.
>Tucker, the executive director of the National Center on Education and the
>Economy,
>sat down at Resnick's kitchen table in her Pennsylvania home to put their
>vision of New
>Standards on paper.
>The two had been key players in producing "America's Choice: High Skills or
>Low
>Wages,'' a landmark report issued that year by the center's Commission on the
>Skills of
>the American Workforce. The high-powered commission included Ira Magaziner,
>now a
>senior policy adviser to President Clinton, and Laura D'Andrea Tyson, now the
>chairwoman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. (Hillary Rodham
>Clinton
>was a member of the national center's board of trustees.)
>The commission contended that if the United States continues to rely on a
>low-skills,
>manufacturing-based economy, the gap between the economic haves and have-nots
>will gradually widen and the nation as a whole will slide into relative
>poverty. (See
>Education Week, June 20, 1990.)
>Its top recommendation for changing that course was to set a new
>"educational-performance standard'' for all students, to be met by age 16.
>"This standard should be established nationally and benchmarked to the
>highest in the
>world,'' the report said.