Entries from AssessmentTests

The second version was utterly mystifying, not least because X and Y were used to represent different values.

Worse yet, I have no clue what goes on with these graphing calculator thingies.

I'm going to have to take a whole course just on calculators.

I guess I can do that while I'm teaching to the test.

Perhaps these schools, along with the drafters of NCLB, labor under the misconception that gifted students will fare well academically regardless of whether their special learning needs are met. Ironically, included in the huge body of evidence disproving this notion are my state's standardized test scores -- the very test scores at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reflecting the schools' inattention to high performers, they show that students achieving "advanced" math scores early in elementary school all too frequently regress to merely "proficient" scores by the end. In recent years the percentage of California students scoring in the "advanced" math range has declined by as much as half between second and fifth grade.

I don't know how to interpret that last statistic, actually -- "In recent years" and "as much as half" aren't specific enough. Here's what I want to know: In the last 4 years, after holding steady at 10% for many years before NCLB, has the percentage of advanced scorers fallen from 10% to 5%? Tell me something like that, and I'll start to worry about the gifted issue in particular. As it is, though, I'm going to subsume this worry into the pile of other worries I already had about NCLB.

NCLB is in many ways, I think, good legislation (for an unfunded federal mandate). I approve of the notion of assessing kids as they move through school, and holding schools accountable; and I like the way NCLB is set up to keep jurisdiction local.

My concern with NCLB is that 100% proficiency goal. I don't think 100% proficiency is attainable, so in the next 8 years until 2014, I fear that we'll see schools falling off the cliff at an accelerating rate. By that I mean that at some point, all schools will be failing to make adequate yearly progress ('AYP' in the edubuzz). How will we deal with this -- by dumbing down the tests until everyone can pass them, or by backing off of that impossible 100% goal? (My guess is that a percentage somewhere in the 90s is actually attainable with earnest work, and would represent a significant improvement in the public schools).

Anything less than 100% may not be politically feasible (think of the slogan: "Only a few kids left behind"). So getting an actual usable policy out of this may be an impossible dream. I fear that a lot of teachers and administrators are going to get burnt out in the next few years, fighting a battle they know from the beginning is unwinnable. And I am afraid the failure is going to set us back in the fight to improve standards in public schools -- an unintended consequence of demanding an unrealistic goal.

As long as I'm airing my darkest fears about NCLB, here's another one: that not only gifted programming, but other 'non-core competency' classes (such as art, music, etc.) are going to get short shrift as more and more money goes into struggling vainly to reach the 100% goal. These classes may not be as 'core' as reading and math -- but it's activities like this that keep many kids in school, and it would be very sad to leave them behind.

As Catherine would say if she were here, "Read and Discuss!"

The value-added methodology, by contrast, doesn't create such incentives to focus on a handful of students. Under the system, every child's improvement counts the same towards the school's overall rating. And the methodology itself is widely seen by those who use it as fairer and more accurate. Value added should thus make it easier for teachers to accept the idea of higher pay for outstanding performance and for working in the toughest schools—changes many see as important next steps in reforming education. Indeed, Dallas is already doing this. Teachers at schools with high value-added scores get financial bonuses.

Many of the obstacles to the widespread use of value-added ratings have been overcome in recent years. Thanks in part to the passage of No Child Left Behind, schools all over the country are on their way to testing every year from 3rd to 8th grade—a prerequisite for the value-added methodology. States are also beefing up their computer and statistical resources. Researchers are still working to address some of the toughest technical issues raised by the value-added method, such as how to measure students who move from school to school and how to compare scores on a subject year-to-year when the curriculum changes. But enough progress has been made that more and more states are looking at the value-added idea.

afterthought

I can imagine that if you had a testing mechanism in place that really did measure the improvement each individual kid was making, and reward for it, you'd have a lot more teachers who'd be willing to take on the toughest schools, because the failingest kids have the biggest potential for improvement on the margin.

So this idea -- provided it really measures what it proposes to measure -- is growing on me.

Ed just called.

On the train he had a chat with a distinguished academic, a Brit.

Her daughter is in middle school, and is doing badly. As the mom put it, 'my very bright daughter who is getting bad grades.'

The mom just wrote a paper, start to finish, for her daughter.

The grade?

C-

Ed said, "Very few Brits who've become distinguished professors can't write."

update: Ed now says it was a C+, not a C-. He also talked to the professor again, and learned that the only reason she'd written the paper was that her daughter was completely overwhelmed with work that night. There was no way she could finish everything, so the mother wrote the paper and the daughter did everything else.



Ed gets a B-

So Christopher just handed in his first paper to his new English teacher.

Ed worked closely with him on it.

He didn't write it. He read Christopher's rough draft and made comments, as a teacher would do, and as this teacher does.^*

Then Christopher revised.

Ed checked grammar, punctuation, paragraph structure, and topic sentences.

The paper came back yesterday with a grade of 80.

I better try my hand on the next one. See if we can get that baby up to 83 or 84.

[update: ok, bad idea ]



my Secret Plan

This reminds me of my Secret Plan.

Back when Christopher got his two Ds from she-who-shall-be-nameless and was asked, in front of the class, 'Are you trying to do the work at all?' I mentioned that Christopher would not be writing any more papers for this teacher.

What I didn't say was that, henceforth, I would be writing Christopher's papers for this teacher.

Ed and I agreed on that course of action the day he wrote his email to the principal.

My plan was to write all of Christopher's papers, start to finish, collect my Cs and Ds, and then, at the end of the school year, publish the whole lot of them on the internet - or, better yet, publish the whole lot of them on the internet and write an article about my experience.

Bestselling author flunks middle school English.

No!

Make that Bestselling author with glowing reviews flunks middle school English.

That works.

I would have done it, too.



at Princeton

Ed told me a great story from his Princeton days.

He met his first wife there. In one of her history courses, she got stalled; just could not bring herself to write the paper that was due.

Finally a professor friend of theirs, also a historian, wrote it for her. I find that shocking, but there it is. This was a famous professor; I think he's well-known & respected to this day. (Come to think of it, he may have been a Brit, too.)

When Ed read the paper he told his girlfriend, "This is too good, you can't hand this in."

She handed it in anyway.

She got a B+.



grade inflation for children who are struggling, grade deflation for children who aren't

I'll write a serious post about this at some point, but that's for later. Suffice it to say that, from where I sit, the notion that there is massive 'grade inflation' in American schools has it exactly backwards. We're experiencing grade deflation. We have a child who does better work at a younger age than either of us ever did, and he's getting worse grades. Much worse.

Other parents have said the same.

I don't know why this should be. But I have to consider the possibility that Grading Hard is another form of false rigor.

You know the curriculum is rigorous because the kids are getting Bs, not As. Or Cs and Ds, not Bs.

As things stand, the system is filled to overflowing with bad incentives.

A behaviorist would tell you that 'incentives' operate mostly outside conscious awareness. That's certainly what I believe.

There are many, many incentives in our school system - perhaps especially in well-financed school districts like my own - to look like you're offering a rigorous, high-quality curriculum whether you are or not.

It would be a miracle if schools hadn't responded to these incentives - and it would be a miracle if they had any idea that they have responded to these incentives.



alternative hypothesis

OK, this makes more sense (from Ken & Steve) [update: this makes sense, but it isn't what's going on in Irvington]:

Ken:

My theory is that in courses where there is subjective grading (most courses outside of math and science) a student's grades are mostly determined by his academic reputation.

[snip]

I transferred schools often as a kid -- in 5th grade, in 7th, and in 10th. Every time I transferred, my grades would always dip a little (I'd get more Bs than A's) until the teachers got to know me. After a quarter or so, they'd always return back up to where they'd always been. I basically I had to re-prove I was an A student before the teachers handed out A's again.

Then there was the time in senior year of high school where I had to take a lower track class (religion I believe) because it was the only class that I could fit in my schedule and even then I had to go seven periods straight through without a lunch. For the first half of the year, the teacher knew who I was and knew I was in his class and graded me accordingly. But, he left after the first semester and a new teacher taught the course. He was new so he didn't know me. I was just another non-college bound kid to him and he didn't exactly have high expectations of the class. Needless to say, he gave me the lowest grade that semester. This wasn't a class of A students; these were mostly B students and they deserved Bs.

Then there was the time in college when I gave all my psych class papers to my friend who was taking the same class two years after I took it (different teacher though). I got all As in that class, don't know whether they were deserved or not. He got out with Cs using the same papers that got me As. Go figure.

Steve:

This is the competitive ice skating grading philosophy. Some skaters can never win no matter how well they do. It's kind of like a running average grade.

wicked thought for the day

This is reminding me of that famous social psych experiment where perfectly normal people checked into mental hospitals as patients with psychiatric diagnoses, and then acted normal.

All of their normal behaviors, IIRC, were interpreted by staff as acting-out or psychotic. (NOT FACT-CHECKED)

Some writer-parent with time on his/her hands ought to write all his/her kid's papers some year as an experiment.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS PERSON WILL NOT BE ME.

I'd love to see someone do it, though.



update: fact-checked

"On Being Sane in Insane Places"

I was right.

After the 'pseudo-patients' were admitted to the psychiatric hospital, all acted sane. None of the doctors picked up on it, but some of the patients did:

The pseudo-patient's sanity went undetected. They spent an average of 19 days (range of 7 to 52 days) on the ward, before being released. When released, they were diagnosed as being `schizophrenic in remission' not as being sane. Some visitors and patients detected the pseudo-patients' sanity (35 out of 118 patients).

^* I must add this: Christopher's new English teacher is lovely, and is teaching a serious course. Christopher comes home nights and reads me the notes he's taken; he's shown me the grammar and spelling they're working on (excellent); I've read the writing instructions she's given them (also excellent). She's even working on his handwriting, which is almost enough in and of itself to put her in my pantheon. Her grading may be stricter than I think right (we'll see), but she is teaching and Christopher is learning. Perhaps even more importantly, he's motivated to learn. In her class, he wants to do his best. UPDATE 9-27-2006: She was a pretty harsh grader, but Christopher was able to improve his work over the course of a semester. The comments at rate my teacher are interesting.


no grade inflation in the suburbs
grade deflation in Irvington
grade deflation in the suburbs, part 2
is there a dangerous myth of grade inflation?

gradedeflation



-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jan 2006

---

TheGap 05 Sep 2006 - 18:55 CatherineJohnson




This is starting to be funny.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Christopher went into his Chapter 10 quiz knowing the material cold.

He had it!

He could find:

• area of a square

• area of a rectangle

• area of a triangle

• area of a parallelogram

• area of a trapezoid

• area of a circle

He had learned all this stuff in about 3 days (YAY!), AND he could do it the KUMON way, with speed and accuracy (DOUBLE-YAY!)




source:
Bitter Single Guy


So what does the test look like?




This:

do we see the problem here?

Christopher has never, in his life, ever, figured the area of a complex figure.

He would never even have seen a complex figure if I hadn't shown him a few and bugged him about how he maybe ought to learn how to figure the area of a complex figure because "It might be on the test."

IT'S NOT GOING TO BE ON THE TEST! NO! IT'S NOT ON THE TEST! WE DIDN'T DO THAT IN CLASS! SHE DIDN'T TEACH US THAT! IT'S NOT ON THE TEST!

etc.

So now, the good news is: Christopher thinks I have Top Secret Mom Knowledge of WHAT'S GOING TO BE ON THE TEST.

That's a Good Thing.



update: Old Grouch says the drawing is wrong

I love this drawing Old Grouch left!

I love it so much I'm completely distracted from the question Old Grouch is raising — (in my next life I may have to be an artist who paints paintings of MATH)

Which dimensions on the drawing are Christopher's, and which were given as part of the test? If the (3cm+6cm) and the center 9cm lines are really parallel, the hypotenuse of the "one triangle" on the left CAN'T be 12cm... it has to be greater than 14cm.

Here's Anne:

Yes, yes, yes!!! I knew there was something totally bothering me about this problem.

If you use the marked numbers on the test of 4cm for the height and 13cm for the base, the hypotenuse of the triangle on the left is the square root of 185 which is between 13 and 14. But the base of the triangle on the left marked 10cm cannot be correct. If you draw a line parallel to this 10 cm base with its start at the right hand corner where the circle is and drop it to the bottom, you get a right triangle with a hypotenuse of 14 and sides 3 and 10. This is not possible since 3² + 10² does not equal 14².

Also, since the horizontal line marked 6 cm is parallel to the horzonal line marked 9 cm, the two vertical sides of the resulting parallogram have to be parallel and the same length. But, as I've pointed out, the length cannot be 14 cm because the sides are 3 and 10.

So the student who said he couldn't do this problem was absolutely right. You can't do this problem if you try to get all the number right because they don't come out right.

The funny thing is, when I put in my original post about this being a problem for high school geometry students, I believe it was because my intuitive brain recognized the problems, but didn't articulate the words to my verbal brain.

Thanks to Old Grouch for pointing out all the errors.

update: Ed and I just looked at this —

This drawing is wrong, no question.

Ed and I see that if the (3cm + 6cm) line is parallel to the 9cm line, then the left line labelled 12cm has to be 14cm.

We don't remember our high school geometry well enough to pick up on Anne's observation.

I do think this is a case of Anne's cognitive unconscious knowing something Anne's conscious mind didn't. To wit: this problem is way too hard for an 11 year old.

Ed just said this problem might be good for a sophomore, if the assignment is to explain what's wrong with the figure. (Yes?)



update: the test was 'easy'

Christopher just told me that when he went in for extra help on Thursday (he sees the math teacher once a week for extra help) she told him the test was easy.

I just told Ed, and he said, 'Then you have to bring this to her attention.'

I guess so!





I have this t-shirt.



The X-rated version is here. I figure if eduwonk can perseverate on big-girl panties, I can post x-rated tourist-wear.



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Feb 2006

---

ImpendingDoom 27 Sep 2006 - 17:37 CatherineJohnson





The kids took a sample state math test today. It was a debacle. Especially the 'short answer' questions, where you have to actually do some math and find an answer. Christopher got 13 out of 24 right. The smartest kid in the class scored 19.

Meanwhile the kids in Phase 3 are coming up with scores like FIVE.

I'm sure TRAILBLAZERS will solve these problems.



update

Remember Christopher's friend-in-flunking from 4th grade?

This was the boy who was in Christopher's math class, getting the same Ds and Fs Christopher was getting. He's in Phase 3 to this day, and hasn't made up the lost ground as far as I can see.

He just called. He got 4 answers right. Out of 24.

So all my hard efforts are paying off!

Christopher is now flunking math at a much higher level!



Glencoe top secret test prep

The kids are preparing for the state test using a Glencoe booklet called Mastering the Intermediate Level Mathematics Test: Diagnose - Prescribe - Practice Workbook.

Apparently, this is a booklet only Official School Personnel can purchase. Its existence is mentioned nowhere in any materials available to parents or students. You can Google it all you want; you can look up the ISBN number; you can drill down into the deepest, darkest recesses of the Glencoe website.

It's not there.

This kind of thing makes me nuts. A couple of years ago I tried to buy the SRA spelling curriculum, Spelling Through Morphographs. It's a remedial program, co-written by Seigfried Engelmann. I had no idea who Engelmann was at the time, which makes Spelling Through Morphographs the second Engelmann book I picked out 'cold,' the first being Engelmann's book about teaching your kid to read.

Apparently Seigfried Engelmann and I are as one.

Here's the description:

Spelling Through Morphographs
Grade Levels 4 - Adult
Successful spellers in just 20 minutes a day!

Spelling Through Morphographs is a remedial program, designed to give older students the tools they need to learn to spell. The program teaches a variety of morphographs -- prefixes, suffixes, and word bases -- and a small set of rules for combining them so that students learn a spelling strategy they can apply to thousands of words.

Fast-paced lessons and a systematic review of every morphograph, combined with a few simple spelling rules, ensure that spelling strategies are mastered. In the first half of Spelling Through Morphographs alone, students learn over 252 morphographs and the rules needed to spell over 3,000 words. By the end of the program, they learn over 500 morphographs, and are able to spell over 12,000 words. And the fact that morphographs have meaning not only helps students remember their spelling, but it also helps them figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Features:

• Students learn to spell over 500 morphographs and are able to spell over 12,000 words
• Students learn to generate correct spellings from morphographs, not memorization
• Expanded writing and proofreading activities reinforce the connection between spelling and composition

So that's right up my alley. Mathematically speaking, a kid who can't spell has to have some kind of 'lever'; there's not enough time between now and adulthood — or now and the SATs — to memorize each one of however many gazillion words in the English language are known & used by smart people. You have to learn the component parts and a finite set of rules for putting them together.

Naturally, nobody teaches spelling that way any more.

Today spelling is taught 'thematically,' meaning kids are supposed to learn to spell whichever words happen to be used in that week's social studies or ELA units. At the beginning of the week kids are handed a vocabulary list of words they'll be seeing and using that week. Then, at the end of the week, they're supposed to be able to spell them.

This has created a generation of what spelling researchers call 'Friday spellers.'

I'm sure there are many excellent Friday spellers out there.

Christopher is not one of them.

If Christopher's going to learn to spell, he's going to have to have a rational, coherent, intelligent curriculum that's been specifically designed to teach spelling. As in spelling per se.

I figured Spelling Morphographs was it.



foiled again

So I called up the folks at SRA.

They said Forget it; they wouldn't sell me the program unless I could prove I was a bona fide homeschooler. I had to have papers.

I was furious.

My school wasn't teaching my kid to spell, I was spending hours trying to figure out what the he** spelling was in the first place (turns out spelling is reading, only harder), I was trying to find the relevant research fast and get a handle on it fast, and I wasn't having fun doing any of this. Learning math & math ed so I can teach math at home is fun. Learning spelling & spelling ed so I can teach spelling at home is not fun.

I was ready to be done investigating spelling.

I wanted to get whatever book I was going to get and go back to doing routine stuff like earning a living.

I wanted Spelling Morphographs.

But no.

I couldn't have Spelling Morphographs, because I'm not CERTIFIED. I'm not OFFICIAL.

I MIGHT BE TRYING TO CHEAT.

The big textbook publishing outfits have all kinds of bans on selling to parents.

Think about that.

The big textbook companies have formal, fully-enforced rules against selling educational materials to parents.

The big textbook companies are cheerfully oblivious to the fact that it's our money that supports their products in the first place; without parents and other tax-paying citizens, SRA could hang it up. But their products are Top Secret. Can't be sold to us. If our school district elects not to send the textbooks home in the backpack, we don't even get to see what we've paid for.

The customer service rep was a sweet-sounding Texas gal who in fact was homeschooling her own kids. Sounding sympathetic, she rattled off a list of online Christian textbook outfits I could try, and told me she'd give me the phone number for my local rep so I could maybe twist his arm and get him to bend the rules.

This just made me more furious, although I managed not to bite her head off. You're telling me I'm gonna have to dive into the whole arcane world of online Christian homeschooling bookstores (until that moment I hadn't even known there was a whole arcane world of online Christian homeschooling bookstores)^* and figure all that out, too???

You're telling me, Go back to Google and start all over again?

No!

Wrong!

I don't want to start all over again!

I don't want to Google online Christian homeschooling bookstores!

I don't want to call my local SRA rep and beg him to sell me an illegal Spelling Textbook!

My kid can't spell, my school isn't teaching him to spell, and I can't buy a remedial spelling book from SRA?

Because why?

What is the reasoning here?

What am I gonna do with my own personal Parent Copy of a remedial spelling textbook?

Tell my kid the answers before he takes the test?

Wait!

Wait!

That's exactly what I'm gonna do!

I'm gonna tell my kid how to spell the words that are gonna be on the test and make him practice until he can spell them!

The reason I'm gonna do that is: THIS IS SPELLING.

THERE'S NO 'MEMORIZED THE ANSWERS'-TYPE CHEATING IN SPELLING.

MEMORIZING THE ANSWER BEFORE YOU TAKE THE TEST IS SPELLING.


So then naturally I got sidetracked trying to find some way for the state of New York to certify me as a part-time homeschooler, which went nowhere and got me even more aggravated.....and at some point in there I discovered Megawords, thank the Lord.



So now My Tax Dollars are paying for a Top Secret Glencoe Test Prep Diagnose Practice Assign grade 6 workbook that I'm (apparently) not allowed to purchase as a mere parent of a kid who has to take this freaking test.

I can't stand it.






New York state math test prep over vacation
state test impending doom

SRA spelling research

How many words in the English language?
How many words in the English language? (another view)
a million or more words in the English language
FAQs: how many words?



^*Now, of course, I get invited to special Christian homeschool days at Six Flags. I am among the initiate.


-- CatherineJohnson - 03 Mar 2006

---

HowDoYouTeachChildrenToSolveWordProblems 03 Apr 2006 - 03:15 CatherineJohnson



I could use some advice.

The New York State test is coming up on March 14 - 15.

The kids aren't doing well on the sample tests they've taken. Only 2 out of 19 in Christopher's class got a 4 - 'exceeds state standards' - on the one they did last week. Two 4s in an 'accelerated' math class. [update: turns out that's 2 out of all 3 Phase 4 classes, which is close to 60 kids. Two of sixty children in the Irvington Middle School accelerated math class exceed state standard on a practice test.]

It's a joke.

Christopher got a 3 on the sample test, and of course I'm determined that he earn a 4 on the real one; don't ask me why. Same reason people climb Mount Everest, probably. [update 4-23-2006: no, that's not why. Christopher's 4's on NY state tests to date are at odds with the grades he receives in his classes at Irvington Middle School. Part of our new data warehousing initiative involves comparing grades in school to scores on state tests.]

Mount Everest aside, this is a golden opportunity for Christopher finally to learn something about solving word problems. I've mentioned several times that they've done essentially no word problems this year; I'm thinking they must not have done many in 5th grade, either, though I don't recall.

Saxon 6/5, I do recall, does not stress word problems. Or, rather, Saxon teaches word problems very, very carefully, slowly, and deliberately. Kids learn different genres of problems, such as 'problems with equal groups' and practice one-step versions of those problems to mastery. I don't think they do two-step problems until Saxon 7/6 or maybe even 8/7 (though I could be wrong).

This always used to bother me about Saxon. Singapore Math has two-part problems starting in 3rd grade or possibly even earlier. However, now that I'm almost done with Saxon 8/7 myself, I can see the point.

Back when I wrote my dissertation (on 1950s film comedy, no less) I talked about the 'narrational presence' in movies, by which I meant the implied director or author hovering over the proceedings. The narrational presence in a Saxon book is a kind and intelligent person who really, really wants you to learn math - and doesn't expect your parents to hire a tutor or send you to cram school to see to it that you do.

So Saxon builds word problem solving skills slowly, incrementally, and logically. After awhile you're doing two-step and three-step word problems, you're doing them easily, and you're doing them without your parents ever having spent $300 to attend a 30-hour weekend seminar on how to understand changes in math instruction.

John Saxon must have had broad shoulders, because he sure carries the load.

Unfortunately that's not what we need here.

We need teach-to-crammery problem-solving strategies, and we need them today.

We need teach-to-crammery problelm-solving strategies today because the state test has an open-ended question section that's a killer. It's wall-to-wall story problems, none of which Christopher has ever seen or done. He got 20 out of 25 multiple choice questions right on the sample test. That's not great, but that it will improve easily with practice.

He got 13 out of 24 open questions right. Awful.

The smartest child in the class missed 5 of the open questions. This is a kid who, from where I sit, is unstoppable. And she's scoring 5 wrong out of 24.



'make a chart'

I spent this weekend teaching Christopher the fantastically helpful charts that are in Saxon, Dolciani, and Brown and Dolciani (Brown's book being a terrific basic algebra text, btw. In the past, inexpensive teacher's editions for Brown have been easy to find.)

How I wish I'd known about 'word problem charts' when I was a kid. They're incredible.

And how I wonder why Prentice Hall doesn't have them.

I'll post a couple of examples, but in the meantime, here's the simplest one:




I find this beautiful.

• It's simple, clean, and instructive. Every time Christopher fills out a Dolciani/Saxon/Brown-type chart he rehearses and 'sees' again the relationships among these numbers.

• Once a value has been entered in its correct place on the chart, the student doesn't have to hold it in memory. Nor does he have to re-read the problem to re-find whichever number he's forgotten while remembering whichever number he's (currently) remembering. When you're just learning to solve word problems, you're constantly forgetting one number while remembering some other number. People always say that the 'big problem' with word problems is they're hard to read, but I'm starting to think the big problem is they're impossible to remember. Which may amount to the same thing, of course.
  These charts take such an enormous burden off of working memory that I wonder whether Temple might have been able to learn algebra if someone had taught her to construct them.)

• Finally, the fraction bar is already there, implicitly and almost explicitly, in the lines of the chart. When I pointed this out to Christopher he said, 'Oh, yeah' in his happy 'I get it' voice.

more charts
















update

Here are the Prentice-Hall triangle charts.

Horrid.



your advice?

So here's my question.

Last night, watching Christopher read word problems, I could see that he had no clue.

He wasn't even pulling out the numbers, especially; his approach seemed completely haphazard. He seems just to guess positions and operations.

The minute I showed him the charts, he started knowing what he was after & being able to find it in the problem.

He needs a strategy.

At the moment, I'm telling him to circle each 'math fact' and underline the question. I also suggested using yellow highlighter to highlight the math facts and blue to highlight the question. He likes that idea, but I'm not sure it's practical for the state test, which is timed.

But I'm wondering whether I also ought to make up some kind of 'teaching template' he would have to fill in for each problem he does.

Something like this:


question: _________________

what I know: _______________

what I know _______________

what I know _______________

what I need to find out (if needed) _____________

what I need to find out (if needed) _____________


I thought of this because I saw somebody on a website somewhere do something similar. Now, of course, I have no idea what or where that website was.

Any suggestions?


I gather Mildred and Tim Johnson's book, How to Solve Word Problems in Algebra, is the best of the lot, but I probably don't have time to pick up a copy before next week.




how do you teach your child word problems?
mini problems (important)

teachtocrammery



-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Mar 2006

---

SampleProblemsStateTestPrep 11 Mar 2006 - 23:09 CatherineJohnson


What do you think of these?

I actually like them (though that opinion is on probation until I hear from some of you).

I'm enjoying the test-prep Pause. The kids are doing nothing with Prentice-Hall, which I've come to loathe, and instead are trying to solve sensible or at least semi-sensible problems.

There's an opportunity here!

Here are some problems from Glencoe's open answer section:


Nadine had 4 friends visiting. She had 2/3 of a pie left to serve them, so she divided it into 4 slices. What fraction of the whole pie did each friend receive?

What is the value of n, if a = 5?    n = a x 4





Here's one I don't get:


Tito collected data about his school. One of the things his data showed was that 3 out of every 7 students in the school are boys.

Part A If 3 out of every 7 students are boys, write equivalent fractions that can be used to determine how many out of 84 are boys.

Part B Solve the equivalent fractions. Explain how you arrived at your answer.


That's the part I don't understand.

What should he explain here?

Should he say 'I cross-multiplied'?

Is that the explanation?

I have no idea.

There was one hilarious problem....

I found it.


There were 4576 people at Mrs. Sunshine's cafe. Each of them placed zero orders for Brussels sprouts.

a) How many Brussels sprouts were ordered?

b) Show your equation and explain how you arrived at your answer.


We both sat around laughing about that one.

What's that saying about 'walking back the cat'?

OK, there are zero orders of Brussels sprouts so that makes....zero orders of Brussels sprouts....so my equation is.....ZERO.....and my explanation is NOBODY ORDERED THE FREAKING BRUSSELS SPROUTS SO THAT'S HOW I KNEW THE ANSWER WAS ZERO.

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Mar 2006

---

MathJournalDayTwo 30 Jun 2006 - 16:49 CatherineJohnson



OK, state tests start one week from tomorrow, and the kids wrote in their Math Journals again today.

They wrote in their Math Journals yesterday, too. The teacher put an inspirational quote about what to do when you crash into a wall up on the board, and they were supposed to write about how the quote related to the state test. (NOTE: Christopher cannot pronounce inspirational.)

Today's quote was something about 'not thinking about what you've lost.'

Excuse me while I hunt down a Google image for banging my head against the wall.

[pause]

OK, that was quick.




No math homework tonight!

No Top Secret Glencoe Diagnose - Prescribe - Practice workbook!

No math of any kind!

So I've spent my entire evening pulling worksheets out of the 3-inch DuraTech worksheet binder I assembled awhile back and combining them with fill-in-the-gap worksheets I tracked down on the web today and coaxing-coercing Christopher to apply himself and do some math.

news flash: Christopher does not appear to know how to read a coordinate plane.

More specifically, he does not appear to know that a coordinate plane is made up of two number lines; nor does he seem to understand that you never, ever, under any circumstances have positive numbers to the left of the zero, or below the zero in the case of the Y axis.

THEY ALWAYS PUT THE NUMBERS ON!!!!!

HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT WAS A NEGATIVE NUMBER!!!!

THEY DIDN'T PUT ANY NUMBERS ON!!!!

etc.

diagnose - prescribe - practice!



winner worksheets

Two fantastic resources:

• Glencoe Pre-algebra Parent and Student Study Guide
  "The Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide is designed to help you support, monitor, and improve your child's math performance. These worksheets are written so that you do not have to be a mathematician to help your child."
  The entire guide is available free online.
  SUPERB

• Mathtastic worksheets by Susan D. Phillips
  50 worksheets, mostly pre-algebra with some algebra, all available free online
  EXCELLENT

The other two sources I'm relying on are Kelley Wingate Pre-Algebra and Instructional Fair Pre-Algebra. Both are quite good, though I've gotten more use out of Instructional Fair for some reason. I'll probably spring for most of the Instructional Fair workbooks as I go along. The Lakeshore stores carry them, and you can order them online from Frankschaffer.com, though they're somewhat difficult to track down on the site.



Instructional Fair



Kelley Wingate




This is interesting. A Math Journal with a bunch of math inside. No sayings about "not thinking about what you've lost" and such.

update

Is this a DuraTech 3" binder?

I think not.


-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Mar 2006

---

OnStudyingForTheStateTest 11 Mar 2006 - 23:10 CatherineJohnson



This is thrilling.

I noticed today that on February 19 Christopher couldn't do this problem from the Glencoe test prep book:


On Friday and Saturday, there were a total of 200 cars in the parking lot of a movie theater. On Friday, 120 cars were in the parking lot.

Part A
What percent of the total number of cars were in the parking lot on Friday?
Show your work.

Part B
What percent of the total number of cars were in the parking lot on Saturday?
Show your work.


Tonight he did it no sweat.

Thanks to Saxon Math.


-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Mar 2006

---

MathJournalDayThree 12 Mar 2006 - 21:40 CatherineJohnson


State test starts on Tuesday next week, and today is Thursday. It's getting close.

So today the kids wrote in their math journals about two quotes, not just one. Assignment was the same as always: give their reaction and say how the quote would help them on the test.

Christopher remembers today's quotes as being:

If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.


and


You'll always face challenges, but you should never be defeated.

I'm thinking I should send in the quote Jeff Boulier found about automaticity, and suggest she have the kids journal about the importance of having utterly mastered one's work.

That would be a novelty.

They have so utterly mastered their work that they work without thinking;
Holding three-fifths of their brain in reserve for whatever betide.
So, when catastrophe threatens, of colic, collision or sinking.
They shunt the full gear into train, and take that small thing in their stride.

I have to go find my collection of Margaret Thatcher quotes about hard work and why people like to do it.

Have I mentioned that in the state of New York it's against the law to homeschool your child in just one subject?



back again

Can't find the Thatcher line I was thinking of. It's buried somewhere on the basement PC, so that's a project for another day. However, I did scare up a bunch of alternate quotes I'd like to throw up on that board....

In the meantime, here's Stephanie:

I cannot believe they're still writing in the journals! Do they have stress counselors standing by, too? At this point, they should be giving the kids practice in problems that the kids already know how to do, and that will appear on the test. How 'bout giving the kids some feelings of actual success on actual math problems before the testing starts?

As usual, a KTMmer has read my mind.....you guys are starting to get psychic.

Check this out.

I've (obsessively) mentioned the fact that Christopher is not one of the straight-A students in math (or anything else).

So today Christopher comes home full of pep, opens with his 500-millionth 'THE TEACHERS SAID YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO STUDY FOR THE STATE TEST' protest, then stands there in the middle of the living room looking cocky.

'What's up?'

Math journal, two quotes, rainbow, rain, etc.

'Did you do any math in math class?'

oh, yeah!

We did problems about cups.

'Cups?'

Yeah, how many cups in something. There was a really hard problem, and I was the only person who could do it.

With some prompting, he finally remembered the problem:


______ quarts = 48 ounces


The kids were given a chart showing what all of the various liquid measures equal, and they had to go from ounces to quarts.

This is the accelerated class.

Christopher was the only kid who could do it.

She's psyching them out.

update: Christopher wasn't the only kid who could do it — though he was one of only a few — and no, she's not psyching them out.



dimensional analysis rocks

One of my Mental Categories now, when I think about how to teach math, is to prefer to teach procedures that instruct while also solving the problem.

For instance, I don't think cross-multiplication — which I would teach (it's just too powerful & easy to remember to forego) — has a lot of instructional value. (That's my guess.)

Dimensional analysis, I think, is the exact opposite.

Not only is it an incredibly useful, simple, impossible-to-forget procedure, BUT it gives you 'instruction' in converting units of measurement every time you do it.

When you set up a sequence of unit multipliers, you see the conversion process all laid out in front of you. You see that to convert from ounces to quarts you're going to go through 4 steps (ounces to cups to pints to quarts). You see that sometimes you multiply & sometimes you divide.....You're getting a mini-lesson in what you're doing while you're doing it.

Christopher didn't use unit multipliers to solve the conversion problem in class today. (Dang!)

But the reason he could do it when everyone else couldn't (apart from the fact that we're not sitting around journaling about COPING WITH MATH FAILURE) is that he's done a bunch of dimensional analysis problems here at home.

Thank you, Dan K.


Ms. K teaches dimensional analysis



-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Mar 2006

---

GlencoeListsGrade6NewYorkStandards 12 Mar 2006 - 00:02 CatherineJohnson



In a fit of civic-mindedness I've decided to type up Glencoe's list of NY State standards to be assessed in Tuesday's test.

I'm coming to love Glencoe. I've mentioned their Parent and Student Study Guide, which they've made available to everyone free online, as well as Glencoe's Diagnose - Prescribe - Practice test prep booklet, which has been terrifically helpful. IMO it would have been helpful whether we'd had a state test coming up or not.

A couple of weeks ago my friend Kris said she wished she had a list — a simple list — of the procedures & concepts her son is learning this year.

That way she could keep track of what he knows and doesn't know, and quickly give him a few more problems to do when she sees he's weak on something.

I think every parent needs a List, and I imagine most teachers either need such a list or already have one.

Glencoe's list of 'Strands and Performance Indicators,' at the front of the booklet, is just the ticket. I spent quite a bit of time searching the NY Department of Education website looking for a list of Grade 6 skills and concepts that made sense — a list that specified math that could actually be done on a test.

What I wasn't looking for were standards like 'Understand that some ways of representing a problem are more efficient than others,' or 'Act out or model with manipulatives activities involving mathematical content from literature.'

If it's there on the NY website, and I have to assume it is, I didn't find it. [update: found it ]

Then the Glencoe test prep book came home and I had what I needed. Glencoe lays it all out in 4 pages.

Below are the 'Post-March' Grade 5 'Strands and Performance Indicators' that are tested in 6th grade.

When I type up the rest of the Strands and Performance Indicators I'll post them on a side page with a link here and elsewhere.



New York State Mathematics
Content Strands, Grade 5, Post-March Indicators

These indicators from Grade 5 are assessed on the Grade 6 Test.

STRAND ALGEBRA
Variables and Expressions
5.A.2 Translate simple verbal expressions into algebraic expressions
5.A.3 Substitute assigned values into variable expressions and evaluate using order of operations
Equations and Inequalities
5.A.4 Solve simple one-step equations using basic whole-number facts
5.A.5 Solve and explain simple one-step equations using inverse operations involving whole numbers

STRAND GEOMETRY
Coordinate Geometry
5.G.12 Identify and plot points in the first quadrant
5.G.13 Plot points to form basic geometric shapes (identify and classify)
5.G.14 Calculate perimeter of basic geometric shapes drawn on a coordinate plane (rectangles and shapes composed of rectangles having sides with integer lengths and parallel to the axes)

STRAND STATISTICS AND PROBABILITY
Probability
5.S.5 List the possible outcomes for a single-event experiment
5.S.6 Record experiment results using fractions/ratios
5.S.7 Create a sample space and determine the probability of a single event, given a simple experiment (e.g., rolling a number cube)


source:





another Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide

Searching for the URL for the Pre-Algebra Parent and Student Study Guide, I found this Glencoe guide to their book MATHEMATICS: APPLICATIONS AND CONNECTIONS COURSE 2.

I haven't looked at it yet.


Pre-Algebra, Parent and Student Study Guide Workbook at Amazon





-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Mar 2006

---

HorseDesignedByCommittee 14 Mar 2006 - 01:39 CatherineJohnson



Now I know why I couldn't find a list of procedures and concepts that would be on the state test.

I did find it, I just didn't read far enough into the document to know I'd found it.



NYS SED Math Standards Grade 6

You have to read the whole thing to find the actual math that's mixed in with the blah-blah.

The state standards sound like two different people wrote them.

One person was Constance Kamii.

The other person was David Klein.

Here's how the document begins:

Problem Solving Strand

Students will build new mathematical knowledge through problem solving.

6.PS.1    Know the difference between relevant and irrelevant information when solving problems
6.PS.2    Understand that some ways of representing a problem are more efficient than others
6.PS.3    Interpret information correctly, identify the problem, and generate possible strategies and solutions


Your basic parent, reading the Problem Solving Strand, thinks to herself: I don't believe edhelper has worksheets on knowing, understanding, and/or interpreting.

Moving along, we find:


Students will solve problems that arise in mathematics and in other contexts.

6.PS.4    Act out or model with manipulatives activities involving mathematical content from literature
6.PS.5    Formulate problems and solutions from everyday situations
6.PS.6    Translate from a picture/diagram to a numeric expression
6.PS.7    Represent problem situations verbally, numerically, algebraically, and/or graphically
6.PS.8    Select an appropriate representation of a problem
6.PS.9    Understand the basic language of logic in mathematical situations (and, or, and not)

PARENT:  What am I, a mind reader?


Students will apply and adapt a variety of appropriate strategies to solve problems.

6.PS.10    Work in collaboration with others to solve problems
6.PS.11    Translate from a picture/diagram to a number or symbolic expression.
6.PS.12    Use trial and error and the process of elimination to solve problems
6.PS.13    Model problems with pictures/diagrams or physical objects
6.PS.14    Analyze problems by observing patterns
6.PS.15    Make organized lists or charts to solve numerical problems

PARENT: NEXT


Students will monitor and reflect on the process of mathematical problem solving.

6.PS.16    Discuss with peers to understand a problem situation
6.PS.17    Determine what information is needed to solve problem
6.PS.18    Determine the efficiency of different representations of a problem
6.PS.19    Differentiate between valid and invalid approaches
6.PS.20    Understand valid counterexamples
6.PS.21    Explain the methods and reasoning behind the problem solving strategies used
6.PS.22    Discuss whether a solution is reasonable in the context of the original problem
6.PS.23    Verify results of a problem

PARENT: My taxes are WAY too high.



Reasoning and Proof Strand

Students will recognize reasoning and proof as fundamental aspects of mathematics.

6.RP.1    Recognize that mathematical ideas can be supported using a variety of strategies
6.RP.2    Understand that mathematical statements can be supported, using models, facts, and relationships to explain their thinking

PARENT: ...charter schools, vouchers...


Students will make and investigate mathematical conjectures.

6.RP.3    Investigate conjectures, using arguments and appropriate mathematical terms
6.RP.4    Make and evaluate conjectures, using a variety of strategies

PARENT: ...ED SCHOOL ..... MUST ..... DIE ...


Somewhere in there I started skipping ahead, and when I saw that the next 3 sections were the Communication Strand, the Connections Strand, and the Representation Strand, I called it a day.

Turns out I should have kept going, because once you get through the Representation Strand ('Use mathematics to show and understand physical phenomena (e.g., determine the perimeter of a bulletin board') the Constance Kamii part is done, and the David Klein part begins with:


Number Sense and Operations Strand

Students will understand numbers, multiple ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems.

Number Systems

6.N.1    Read and write whole numbers to trillions
6.N.2    Define and identify the commutative and associative properties of addition and multiplication
6.N.3    Define and identify the distributive property of multiplication over addition
6.N.4    Define and identify the identity and inverse properties of addition and multiplication
6.N.5    Define and identify the zero property of multiplication
6.N.6    Understand the concept of ratio
6.N.7    Express equivalent ratios as a proportion
6.N.8    Distinguish the difference between rate and ratio
6.N.9    Solve proportions using equivalent fractions
6.N.10    Verify the proportionality using the product of the means equals the product of the extremes
6.N.11    Read, write, and identify percents of a whole (0% to 100%)
6.N.12    Solve percent problems involving percent, rate, and base
6.N.13    Define absolute value and determine the absolute value of rational numbers (including positive and negative)
6.N.14    Locate rational numbers on a number line (including positive and negative)
6.N.15    Order rational numbers (including positive and negative)

etc.

Now we're talking.


Constance Kamii goes to Ireland



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Mar 2006

---

MeapScores 16 Mar 2006 - 14:05 CatherineJohnson



from Anne Dwyer:

We just got back the results for our MEAP tests.

The kids usually take them at the end of the year. This year they took them in Oct.

For math, here are my elementary school results: Grade 3: 89.2 exceed standards Grade 4: 62.9% exceed standards Grade 5: 43.4% exceed standards

This tells me that the kids are good in math until they hit anything above addition and subtraction. Then they hit the wall. The higher the number of skills required, the worse they do.

The school has been using Everyday Math for 8 years. Curriculum director says everything's fine.



point of comparison

At the fourth-grade level, the U.S. did reasonably well on the TIMSS exam. Our students scored above the international average in both math and science. In science, in fact, we came very close to being number one in the world; our fourth-graders were second only to the South Koreans. In mathematics, on the other hand, our performance was only decent; it was above average, though not in the top tier of countries. (Detailed findings, including tables and graphs, can be found on our Web site, http://ustimss.msu.edu, or at the U.S. Department of Education’s TIMSS Web site, http://nces.ed.gov/timss).

By eighth grade, however, the U.S. dropped to the international average, slightly above average in science and slightly below average in mathematics. In other words, just four years along in our educational system, our scores fell to average or even below average. The decline continues so that by the end of secondary school our performance is near the bottom of the international distribution. In both math and science, our typical graduating senior outperformed students in only two other countries: Cyprus and South Africa.

Some people might ask, “What difference does it make if we can’t do fancy math problems?” It does make a difference. A typical item on the TIMSS 12th-grade math test shows a rectangular wrapped present, provides its height, width, and length, as well as the amount of ribbon needed to tie a bow, and asks how much total ribbon would be needed to wrap the present and include a bow. Students simply need to trace logically around the package, adding the separate lengths so as to go around in two directions and then add the length needed for the bow. Only one-third of U.S. graduating seniors can do this problem, however. This is serious.

source:
William Schmidt
A Coherent Curriculum: The Case of Mathematics (pdf file)
AMERICAN EDUCATOR

update: 4th graders aren't great, either

Jo Anne Cobasko left a link to the recent AIR study (pdf file) finding that in fact our 4th graders aren't doing especially well, either.

Despite a widely held belief that U.S. students do well in mathematics in grade school but decline precipitously in high school, a new study comparing the math skills of students in industrialized nations finds that U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade perform consistently below most of their peers around the world and continue that trend into high school.

Thanks, Jo Anne —



-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Mar 2006

---

NclbIsWorking 16 Mar 2006 - 23:44 CatherineJohnson




Truth in headlines: NCLB may or may not be working, I don't know

And the downside is obvious: states will dumb down their standards and declare victory

Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch are now warning that the political pressures unleashed by NCLB may corrupt NAEP, too. ($) free version here: Basic Instincts

Nevertheless, the principals in this WAPO article are saying exactly what I want to hear:

Why Is Your School On This List?
More than 200 Washington-area schools failed to meet the standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act. So Outlook asked local for an explanation.

Sunday, March 12, 2006; B01

BY Reginald Ballard

I am having my teachers develop plans to determine the skills that the students who were close to receiving satisfactory scores need to improve. I have teachers doing lesson plans on those skills, and they have to tell me where their students are after each assessment, and how they are going to move them to the next level.

[snip]

Our students are often functioning two to three years behind their peers. So wherever and whenever possible we continue to go back and provide remedial services to improve the students' basic learning skills. We do it through daily drills and practice, learning centers and after-school tutoring programs.

We remain optimistic and positive about the gains the students are making. We realize that America has established a measuring stick and we offer no excuses for not attempting to meet the established mark, while at the same time we strive every day to meet our students' emotional and social needs.

[snip]

This year, as soon as we identified the students who did not pass the tests, or who our other assessments suggested may not pass, we designed an individual learning plan for each student and monitored each student's progress. Adjustments in each student plan have been made throughout the year to best meet the needs of the individual child.

[snip]

Our goal is to fully understand what each and every student knows and is able to do. To achieve this goal, we frequently administer, record and analyze student growth and achievement, using the standards as our guide. By identifying the root causes of our achievement deficiencies, we are able to focus our resources and differentiate our staff development. We don't make excuses, we find solutions.

[snip]

We recently held our second annual family math night, where we offer parents the opportunity to learn how to turn practicing mathematical concepts into games.

[I threw that last one in there to see if you're awake]

The wonder of it all is that, obviously, none of these principals were doing this before they were required by law to make AYP.

And that's the Public School Way.

I've just reconnected with an old friend whose kids are in private school. She told me her kids are tested four times a year by a 'learning team' at the school, after which the parents are given a complete rundown of each and every skill their children are learning and whether their children have mastered that skill. One of her kids is behind on plural pronouns, so now he'll have extra instruction on plural pronouns.

The kids in the school are so far ahead of public school kids they can't use tests used by public schools. They have to use the ERB, I believe it is, a test used by private schools.

Needless to say, our own schools, here in Irvington, do not do this. Ever. The kids are tested and tested and tested; Christopher takes at least a test a week, sometimes more.

Then he's given a grade—usually a mediocre one, seeing as how he has no clue how to study & we seem to have forgotten ourselves — and the parade moves on.

Nothing is retaught.

The parent is not informed.

If the child failed to learn the material, tant pis.

All this for $18,000 per pupil spending per year.



Iowa Test of Basic Skills

Awhile back, Lone Ranger left information on how to have your child tested on the ITBS.

I'm going to do it.

order form for the spring test

DEADLINE: April 16, 2006

cost: $38


-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

---

FormativeAssessmentAndLearning 22 Mar 2006 - 01:05 CatherineJohnson



via joannejacobs, new research on formative assessment and learning validates what we've been saying here at ktm for months:

Scientists discover how to pass exams
By Alan Cane and Andrew Jack
Published: March 10 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 10 2006 02:00
($, but you can access through joanne's site)
FINANCIAL TIMES

Psychologists have made an intriguing discovery that could have profound implications for our understanding of human learning mechanisms - and immediate significance for students revising for examinations.

...students understood and retained information more readily when subjected to frequent tests and quizzes while studying than students who simply read material over and over again.

"Our study indicates that testing can be used as a powerful means for improving learning, not just assessing it," said Prof Henry Roediger of the university's psychology department.

[snip]

...students who relied on repeated study alone frequently developed a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the materials even while their grasp of important detail was sliding away. By comparison, students who were either tested repeatedly or tested themselves while revising scored dramatically higher marks. A group of students who read a piece of text 14 times, for example, recalled less than a self-testing group who had read the piece only three or four times. The cause of the phenomenon remains uncovered: one theory is that we learn more efficiently in difficult situations.

So John Saxon, Seigfried Engelmann, and good teachers everywhere have known this for.....how long, would you say?

I'd say forever.

I'm sorry, this is not news.

Or rather, it shouldn't be news.

The comparison of 14 read-throughs to 3 or 4 is interesting, though.


keywords: formative assessment mathematics new study experiment


-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

---

TimssTreasureTrove 19 Mar 2006 - 23:00 CatherineJohnson



Look what Google Master found!

1995 TIMSS released items

Incredible!

This is fantastic.

I've logged these in book-style index & favorite math supplements. Plus you can always find them by searching the Assessment subject category.

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Mar 2006

---

StateTest 22 Mar 2006 - 00:19 CatherineJohnson



Christopher came home today and said he got 21 out of 25 correct on the multiple choice section of the state test. (This is the actual state test, not the practice test. In New York, schools grade their own tests.)

Two weeks earlier, before we studied, he got 20 out of 25 correct on the sample test.

I asked him which test was harder. He said the first one.

So that was time well spent.



I take it back

OK, I don't mean that. And I suppose the fact that he thought the first test was harder is good; that probably means our studying brought him closer to mastery. He thought the real test was super-easy.

But that bothers me.

He's not where he should be (I don't think) in terms of cessing out how he did.

If you think a test is super-easy, shouldn't you be scoring somewhere in the 90s?

I don't know.

The frustrating thing is that I'll never know what he got right and what he got wrong. I'll just see some vague 'strands' listed on the report form, with scores attached.



trouble

I stumbled onto a terrifically helpful site: Guide to State and Federal Standards for Academic Year 2005-2006 by the New York State United Teachers.

Here's their rundown of revisions to New York state standards:

Broad changes are under way in how math is tested and taught from pre-K through high school. Here are key points of the two reform packages approved this year by the state Board of Regents:


Pre-K-8

• clearer and more tightly worded standards; [good]
• a narrower, deeper focus on the basics through grade 4; [?]
• more extensive and earlier use of calculators in all grades; [game over]
• performance indicators that spell out what should be taught in each grade; [excellent]
• a State Education Department-developed resource guide and grade-by-grade core curriculum; [reserving judgment]
• job-embedded professional development for teachers; [boondoggle]
• basic algebra to begin in grade 5; [this would be great if the kids were actually going to learn algebra, and be able to do algebra, as opposed to simply understand algebra]
• much of the algebra content from high school Math A moves to math courses in grades 7 and 8; [great, but see above]
• development of precisely worded performance indicators for content and performance for each grade level; [GOOD]
• emphasizing conceptual understanding over memorization. [I always like to see dichotomous thinking in state standards]

Grades 9-12

• Math A and B to be replaced with three one-year courses: algebra, geometry, and Algebra 2 and trigonometry;
• courses to be phased in over three school years, beginning with algebra in 2006-07.

They're not kidding about the calculators:

A key to use of calculators

On the upcoming statewide math tests, only students in grades 7 and 8 will be allowed to use calculators.

Scientific calculators are preferred, although State Ed has said that at a minimum calculators should be four-function with a square root key; graphing calculators are not permitted.

Calculators are not allowed on the multiple-choice questions in Part I, but are permitted on extended-response items in these two grades.

Calculators are not permitted on any tests in grades 3-6.

A key element in the math changes adopted by the state Board of Regents in January was a recommendation for using scientific calculators on assessments in grades 5-8.

State Ed plans to phase in calculator use for math assessments in grades 5 and 6, although the start date has not been set.

So I guess that's it. New York state is fuzzy by law.

A couple of years ago the principal at the Main Street School told me New York was modeling its revised state standards on Singapore. We would teach fewer topics in greater depth. The watchword in Albany, he said, was 'mile-wide, inch deep.'

My first thought was, FANTASTIC!

My second thought was, We'll learn less stuff and we'll still learn it badly.

The heart and soul of Singapore Math isn't fewer-topics-taught-in-greater-depth.

It's fewer-topics-taught-in-greater-depth with huge amounts of problem-solving and no calculators.

Singapore Math is a problem-solving curriculum. From the get-go.

There's no problem-solving in these new standards.

Not even any memorizing.

Just understanding.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Mar 2006

---

EmailToThePrincipal 08 Oct 2006 - 22:40 CatherineJohnson




back story here

Ed just talked to the principal on the telephone.

He was aggressive and unresponsive. The principal, I mean. Not Ed.

So.




Hi Scott —

I’m sending a detailed memo covering our experience with Ms. K’s class this year.

But I’d like to respond to one point immediately.

You observed that Ms. K does not know whether Christopher can do the calculations involved in constructing a scale drawing.

Scott, I agree.

Ms K does not know whether her students have learned the material she’s covered in class.

This is true for all of her students, including those who did record their mental math. We know of one child in the class who has earned grades of C and D on his tests, while scoring an unbroken string of As on the Extended Response problems he takes home to do.

What has that child learned about pre-algebra?

Can Ms. K tell you?

Punishing a child for failing to write down mental math is not teaching; nor is it information. Punitive grading is entirely negative. It demoralizes the child, angers the parents, and erodes trust.

We have two core problems with Ms. K’s teaching, one concerning her ability to inspire, motivate and lead her students to success in mathematics, the other concerning her ability to assess performance. It’s the latter that concerns me here.

Ms. K does not perform systematic, ongoing formative assessment.

She covers material, gives tests, and assigns grades.

And there her responsibility ends.

This year Ed and I have been fully responsible for seeing to it that Christopher actually learns the math Ms. K has ‘covered.’

This wasn’t the case at Dows Lane; nor was it the case with all but one of Christopher’s teachers at Main Street School. That teacher was not asked to return.

I would hope everyone involved in Ms. K’s tenure case would ask himself this question:

Suppose Christopher—or any other student in the class—does not know how to construct a scale drawing?

What happens now?

Ms. K’s answer is: Nothing. Once she’s recorded a grade, she’s done.

If Ms. K wanted to know whether Christopher can construct a scale drawing, she would have him do a simple scale drawing in her presence. She should do that with the entire class, because none of the kids I know was able to handle this assignment on his own. By rights, Ms. K ought to be finding out whether any of her students can do a simple scale drawing independently, without parent guidance.

Instead, it’s up to us to make sure Christopher has mastered this skill.

I will do so this summer when I reteach pre-algebra using Saxon Algebra 1/2.

If I’m going to do Ms. K's job, I want a refund. Ms. K, after two years of work, is going to be awarded lifetime employment, lifetime benefits, and a generous retirement, all funded by taxpayers like me.

Scott, I need to earn a living. I have two children with severe handicaps who will require lifetime care; I must fund my own retirement.

I need to be able to rely on our very well paid teachers to teach my son.

Instead I’m pulling worksheets, buying and studying textbooks, reteaching math lessons, preparing Christopher for the state test (Ms. K told the kids not to study because they ‘don’t know what’s going to be on the test’),^* and helping Christopher’s friends in the class to boot.

This isn’t right.

Catherine Johnson

^* Topics covered on the New York State tests are listed here: http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/mst/mathstandards/g6.html. These topics are also listed in the Glencoe Test Prep book Ms. Kahl sent home sporadically in the run-up to the test.





I am KICKING myself for not homeschooling.

Actually, it's not even at that level.

I'm kicking myself for not having a clue.

I'm kicking myself for not having the slightest idea what was wrong with our public schools.

I'm kicking myself for not even suspecting that, when it comes to public schools, money ≠ quality.




Christopher won't be doing any more 4-hour projects for Ms. K.

That's over.

My only concern now is: is he learning pre-algebra to mastery?

Everything else is noise.




extended response problem from IL state test
extended response problem 1
extended response problem 2
extended response problem 6
extended response problems 7, 8, 9
direct instruction & the rigor conundrum
Dan's daughter reacts to extended response problem
defensive teaching of Singapore bar models
open-ended problems in math ed
problems that teach - "Action Math"
email to the principal

keywords: performance indicators New York state tests New York state standards


-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Mar 2006

---

ErbQuestion 30 Mar 2006 - 08:05 CatherineJohnson



I've been talking to my friend whose kids are enrolled in a superb private school (increasing the Seething Factor exponentially around here, alas).

She sent me to the website for the ERBs, the annual test independent schools use to assess student performance.

I have a question about this data:

The ERB tests provide three different reference groups with whom to compare our students:

• National: students in general, including students in large urban and small rural schools. (NN)
• Suburban (SN)
• Independent schools: including almost all members of the National Association of Independent Schools (SS).

Here is a sample of what the scale score (SS) at the 90, 75, 50, 25, and 10 percentile among independent schools would convert to in National Norms for Public Schools (NN) and Suburban Norms (SN) for public schools from the fall of 2005:

Fall Grade 4:
90th percentile SS of 361 converts to a NN of 98 and SN of 94
75th percentile SS of 351 converts to a NN of 96 and SN of 85
50th percentile SS of 339 converts to a NN of 87 and SN of 65
25th percentile SS of 328 converts to a NN of 72 and SN of 43
10th percentile SS of 319 converts to a NN of 51 and SN of 23

Fall Grade 8:
90th percentile SS of 377 converts to a NN of 97 and SN of 94
75th percentile SS of 368 converts to a NN of 91 and SN of 78
50th percentile SS of 358 converts to a NN of 81 and SN of 56
25th percentile SS of 348 converts to a NN of 66 and SN of 30
10th percentile SS of 338 converts to a NN of 48 and SN of 14


So, for instance, a 4^th grader at an independent school who scored at the 50^th percentile among independent schools students had stronger quantitative ability than 87% of the students around the country (National Norms) and stronger quantitative ability than 65% of students at suburban public schools. A student scoring at the 25^th percentile at an independent school equates with the 72^th percentile nationally (NN) and 43th percentile of suburban public schools (SN). Similarly, for 8^th graders, a student who scored at the 50th percentile at an independent school was comparable to a student who scored at the 81^st percentile among all students across the country (national norms) and the 56^th percentile among students in suburban public schools.

I'm curious about the 8th grade scores.

Why don't we see a widening gap between private & public school scores?

Shouldn't we see that if private school students don't have the steady decline in skills public school students do?

What am I missing?



ERBs & SATs

Here's the comparison to SATs. Off the top of my head, this looks pretty impressive. When you find private school kids from families with incomes over 100K outscoring public school kids with the same income by 100 points - that seems pretty amazing to me.

Success on SATs

Private school students excel on standardized tests as well. Students who attended NAIS independent schools earned significantly higher SAT scores than students from other types of schools.

On average, students at NAIS schools scored 167 points higher (out of 1600 possible points) than students from public schools (NAIS students: 1193; public school students: 1026).

The lower the family income, the greater the performance gap between NAIS students and public school students.

For students from families with incomes of $10-$20,000, the SAT score differential favored NAIS independent schools by 157 points (NAIS students:1054; public school students: 897);

For students from families with incomes of $30-$40,000 the SAT score differential favored NAIS independent schools by 154 points (NAIS students:1114; public school students: 960);

For students from families with incomes over $100,000 the SAT score differential favored NAIS independent schools by 112 points (NAIS students:1227; public school students:1115).^**

Similar results favoring students in NAIS independent schools can be seen when the data are sorted using other indicators of socioeconomic status, such as the parents' highest degree of educational attainment.

NAIS-school students whose parents have a high school diploma but no post-secondary education posted SAT scores that were 140 points higher than public school students whose parents had the same academic qualifications. (NAIS: 1083; public school: 943)

Among students whose parents had attained graduate degrees, NAIS school students averaged scores that were 118 points higher than those of public school students.


^* from Ken: That's half a standard deviation which is educationally significant (1/4 sd).



udpate: here's the TIMSS chart I've posted before

Tracy pointed out something amazing: New Zealand is moving steadily upwards across the years! (Maybe I can get Christopher accepted into an exchange program in New Zealand! All I need to know is: what are autism programs like in NZ??)





-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Mar 2006

---

SchoolsPushReadingMath 06 Apr 2006 - 21:53 CatherineJohnson



Another NCLB horror story from the TIMES:

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math

The jist of the report is that schools not making AYP are forcing students testing below grade level to take math and reading all day long.

My favorite line comes from Columbia Teachers College:

Other experts warn that by reducing the academic menu to steak and potatoes, schools risk giving bored teenagers the message that school means repetition and drilling.

"Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."

Yes, that's just what it's like.

You've got teenagers who can't read or do percents after 9 years in school; they're just like a violin student. What a sadness.

Unfortunately, the non-fuzzies are just as bad. At least, some of them are:

The report says that at districts in Colorado, Texas, Vermont, California, Nebraska and elsewhere, math and reading are squeezing other subjects. At one district cited, the Bayonne City Schools in New Jersey, low-performing ninth graders will be barred from taking Spanish, music or any other elective next fall so they can take extra periods of math and reading, said Ellen O'Connor, an assistant superintendent.

"We're using that as a motivation," Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on their math and reading so they can again participate in some course they love."

Yeah, that'll work.

They can't read, they can't do math, they've spent their entire childhoods failing at school; I KNOW! LET'S TAKE AWAY SOMETHING THEY LIKE! THAT'LL GET THEM GOING!

The psychology of human motivation does not seem to be a widely studied subject in ed schools.






Meanwhile, my question is: WHAT HAVE THEY GOT THESE STUDENTS READING FOR 3 ENGLISH PERIODS A DAY?????

It can't be history?

It can't be science?

It can't be anything with actual content?

And we're doing this because why?

Because we don't happen to have a fairly extensive body of research and expert opinion holding that CONTENT is CRITICAL TO READING ABILITY?

I am really hoping these kids aren't slogging through basal readers 3 hours a day. Because if they are, they're not going to be making grade level any time soon.





Losing Our Language


Sandra Stotsky at Fordham
Whose Literacy Is Declining?
review of Losing Our Language (haven't read as yet)



-- CatherineJohnson - 03 Apr 2006

---

GradeDeflationInTheSuburbsPart2 10 Apr 2006 - 15:05 CatherineJohnson



Ed got the scoop on the distinguished historian who got a C- on her middle school paper.

Turns out she didn't get a C-.

She got a C.

Also, the reason she wrote her daughter's paper was the same reason I put so much time into Christopher's C paper: her daughter was overwhelmed with projects due the next day and there was no possible way she could do it all. So her mother wrote the paper, and the daughter did the rest.





this is rigor in suburbia

At least, this is rigor in my neck of the woods. Overwhelm the children with work they can't possibly manage in the allotted time, then give them Cs and Ds on the work they do complete, and tell the parents, 'He's going to get it. Don't worry. The wheels are spinning. He's thinking.' I heard these exact words last week, from Christopher's English teacher. I don't know exactly what she meant, but judging by her tone she seemed to be saying, 'He's brighter than I thought. With hard work, I think he can learn to read and write at a middle school level.'

The message Ed and I get from our middle school — the tone of the message — is sympathetic and concerned. Don't worry, he's capable of learning, it will take time, why are you thinking about grades so much?

He's an ordinary boy, and ordinary boys are ordinary.

Everyone knows boys do worse in middle school than girls. Direct quote.

You can't compare American schools to European schools. Direct quote.

Given what I'm hearing from other parents, this is the Middle School Message in any number of schools.

I've mentioned this before, but I'll repeat myself:

Three different families have told me their 6th grade children came home not long after the beginning of the year saying that a teacher had 'come into' their classroom, had drawn something that sounds like a bell curve on the board, had told the children that they were 'average,' that 'average' is 'normal,' and that 'average' means a grade of 'C.' The children were not to be upset about getting 'Cs.' They should expect to get 'Cs.' Because they're average.

From where I sit, Irvington Middle School has a formal or informal grading policy that stresses giving Cs to 6th grade students, and perhaps to 7th and 8th grade students as well.

Why else would Mrs. R tell us, on Back to School night, that she would not be assigning 15 minutes of daily reading because middle school is so emotionally painful for children that asking them to read every day would be asking too much?

"That first D is devastating," she said. "Devastating."

I took notes. That is a direct quote. The word she used was devastating. She was telling us our children would be devastated by 6th grade.

And sure enough, my child was devastated by 6th grade — by Mrs. R herself, in fact.

Of course, I don't know that IMS has a formal or informal policy of giving Cs for average work regardless of its quality.

I don't know anything at all about the formal or informal policies governing grading at the Irvington Middle School.

I know a great deal about the appropriate way to communicate with the Irvington Middle School when I have a problem. I am not to go directly to the principal. I am to speak to the teacher first. I am to be cordial when I do.

I don't know anything about curriculum, grading policy, educational philosophy, or the results of any schoolwide testing of my child or how much of the curriculum he has mastered and how well he has mastered it.

the best defense is a good offense

"Middle schools are the place where achievement goes to die."

All middle school administrators have heard this line.

So say you're a middle shool principal who firmly believes that 'you can't expect American schools to do what European schools do' (how many times have I heard our principal and assistant principal say this?)

And say you're getting heat from parents who think that, at $18,000 per pupil spending, this particular American school should do what European schools do.

What's your move?

My move might be to institute a harsh and arbitrary grading policy.

The kids are doing badly, the parents are working around the clock to help their kids 'bring their grades up,' and nobody's got the time or energy to complain about international standing.


no grade inflation in the suburbs
grade deflation in Irvington
grade deflation in the suburbs, part 2
is there a dangerous myth of grade inflation?

bellcurve
gradedeflation

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Apr 2006

---

GradeDeflationInTheSuburbsPart3 09 Apr 2006 - 21:48 CatherineJohnson



Does anyone know a resource that would tell me how other middle schools with kids in our SES grade?

I'm convinced we have grade deflation here. But in fact, I don't know how other schools grade.

Do other middle schools like mine take a 'C' to be 'average' regardless of the quality of the work?

And is there really a dangerous myth of grade inflation?


no grade inflation in the suburbs
grade deflation in Irvington
grade deflation in the suburbs, part 2
is there a dangerous myth of grade inflation?

gradedeflation



-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Apr 2006

---

FormativeAssessmentTreasureTrove 10 Apr 2006 - 18:29 CatherineJohnson



I think I may have stumbled across a formative assessment treasure trove.

new term for formative assessment: "assessment for learning" (AFL)

I like that term pretty well, although I think I'll stick with "low stakes formative assessment" here in Irvington, because of the middle school's preoccupation with the 'high stakes' state tests.

However, if you're Googling formative assessment, you need to know the term "assessment for learning."

Here's another page dedicated to assessment for learning, which includes the characteristics of AFL.




Oddly, no one seems to be mentioning the importance of docking 20 points for not showing all of your work because it's consistent with NY state.


formative versus summative assessment (Princeton Review)
formative and summative assessment (Central Michigan University)



-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Apr 2006

---

BlameGame 11 Apr 2006 - 19:25 CatherineJohnson



Ed chose to tell me, over dinner, that the entire country thinks we aren't spending enough money on the schools.

swell

You may or may not be able to access the National Journal page carrying the poll. It's pretty interesting.

For instance, 5% of Americans give U.S. public schools an overall grade of 'A' for excellent.

That's interesting.

from the Poll Track email:

Nearly six in 10 said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to improve the country's public schools. More than 20 points fewer -- 38 percent -- said they would not.

And the survey indicates respondents aren't happy with the amount of money already allocated to education, either. Sixty-four percent said the country is spending too little money on public schools; 22 percent said it was about the right amount and just one in 10 said it was too much.

Nearly a quarter of respondents -- a slim plurality -- blamed finances for some schools' failure to improve test scores. But nearly as many (21 percent) said school districts were at fault. Eighteen percent blamed parents, 14 percent blamed students themselves and 11 percent blamed teachers.

The No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration initiative designed partly to address accountability in education, got a mixed response in the poll. Thirty-five percent said they thought the 2002 legislation has had a positive effect on schools, but the same number said they thought it hadn't had much impact at all. Twenty-three percent said they saw a negative effect.

Respondents also revealed some trepidation about curriculum. A majority said schools are not "teaching students the skills they will need for our economy in the 21st century," and a 44-percent plurality gave schools an average grade of C.

OK, I'm going to go scrounge for some glimmers of hope....




Conducted 3/28-30/06 by SRBI Public Affairs; surveyed 1,000 adults; margin of error +/-3% (release, 4/9). A response of * indicates less than 1 percent.

Where do you think the United States ranks internationally when it comes to the quality of education we provide overall? Would you say that America is best when it comes to quality of education, in the top 5, top 10, top 20 or below that?

Best                             3%
Top 5                           25
Top 10                          29
Top 20                          22
Below that                      17
No answer/Don't know             3

In general, what grade would you give public schools in the United States -- an "A" for excellence, a "B", "C", "D" or a failing grade of "F"?

A (Excellent)                    5%
B                               31
C                               44
D                               10
F (Failing grade)                7
No answer/Don't know             3

Do you think that we are spending too much money on public schools, too little money or about the right amount of money on public schools?

Too much                        10%
Too little                      64
About the right amount          22
No answer/Don't know             4

Would you be willing to pay higher taxes to improve the public schools, or not?

Willing to pay higher taxes     59%
Not willing                     38
No answer/Don't know             3

Do you think that the public schools overall are teaching students the skills they will need for our economy in the 21st century, or not?

Teaching the skills they need   38%
Not teaching them               57
No answer/Don't know             6

Do you have any children in your household currently attending school, grades "K" thru grade 12?

Yes                             36%
No                              64

(If "yes") Do any currently attend public schools?

Yes                             86%
No                              14
No answer/Don't know             1

(Asked of those who have children attending public schools) And what grade would you give your child's school -- an "A" for excellence, a "B", "C", "D" or a failing grade of "F"?

A (Excellent)                   23%
B                               46
C                               21
D                                7
F (Failing grade)                3
No answer/Don't know             *

(Asked of those who have children attending public schools) Do you think that your child or children attending public schools are being adequately prepared for college if they decide to go to college?

Yes                             62%
No                              33
No answer/Don't know             6

(Asked of those who have children attending public schools) If you had the choice of sending your child to a different school in your area, would you switch schools, or not?

Would switch schools            40%
Not switch schools              57
No answer/Don't know             3

In your opinion, do you think there is too much emphasis on standardized achievement testing in the public schools in your community, too little or about the right amount?

Too much                        44%
Too little                      11
About the right amount          39
No answer/Don't know             6

In 2001, Congress passed President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act. How much would you say that you know about the "No Child Left Behind" act?

Great deal                      17%
Some                            40
Not much                        29
Nothing at all                  14
No answer/Don't know             1

Based on anything you may have seen or heard, do you think that the No Child Left Behind act has had a positive impact on education, a negative impact or not much impact at all?

Positive                        35%
Negative                        23
Not much impact                 35
No answer/Don't know             8

Who is to blame when some public schools fail to improve test scores?

Not enough money                24%
School districts                21
Parents                         18
Students                        14
Teachers                        11
No answer/Don't know            11

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think the significant finding is the one I've posted in red. 57% say students aren't being prepared for the 21st century. That's huge. (well, I think it's huge....)

My impression is that when you're trying to sort through mixed emotions, or confronting a highly charged issue, a useful strategy is to ask people how they think other people would answer the question.

In this survey, I would have liked to see a question asking people what grade they think other Americans would give public schools.

The question about whether generic students are being generically prepared for the 21st century seems sufficiently abstracted from the immediate reality of a respondent's Public School In My Brain Nexus to cut through Americans' universal love of public schools.

It's also interesting that NCLB polls as well as it does. NCLB is the target of a pervasive, coordinated negative campaign from the unions supported by a wide swathe of the media. (aside: I don't say this as an editorial comment. NCLB may end up doing more harm than good; I have no idea.) If I were running the NEA, the fact that only 23% of the country thinks the law has had a negative impact would have me worried.


TIME/Oprah poll (public school, money, NCLB, 21st century)
the politics of vouchers Terry Moe, political scientist



-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Apr 2006

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EngelmannOnGalenAlessiStudy 11 Apr 2006 - 15:53 CatherineJohnson



Galen Alessi wrote an article in 1988 in which he diagnosed diagnosis. He asked 50 school psychologists to indicate how many cases they referred during the year. The average was about 100 per psychologist; so the group provided information on about 5000 kids. Alessi next tried to determine the different causes of the kid's learning problems. How many of the kids had the learning problem because of inappropriate curriculum? How many had learning problems because of poor teaching, or because of school administration problems? How many kids had problems because of home problems, or because there was some defect in the kid?

The percentages came out something like this:

• The curriculum caused 0% of the referred problems:
• The teaching practices caused 0% of the referred problems;
• The school administration caused 0% of the referred problems;
• The home environment caused 10-20% of the referred problems;
• The child caused 100% of the referred problems.
  

Source: War Against the Schools’ Academic Child Abuse by Siegfried Engelmann, page 65









key words: blame the student school psychologist
Pamela Darr Wright summary of Galen Alessi study
Evolving Functions for the School Psychologist
Whose Fault Is It?
educational rights of special need children versus typical children
Engelmann on Galen Alessi study
Pamela Darr Wright posted to ktm
"public school has never been about outputs..."



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Apr 2006

---

PamelaDarrWrightOnGalenAlessiStudy 12 Apr 2006 - 18:19 CatherineJohnson



summary by Pamela Darr Wright
full text here


The Blame Game"

Dr. Galen Alessi, Professor of Psychology at Western Michigan University, conducted a fascinating study on school psychologists. Dr. Alessi's study illustrates why so many parents have problems dealing with schools. Dr. Alessi's article is "Diagnosis Diagnosed: A Systemic Reaction" published in "Professional School Psychology", 3 (2), 145-151.

The primary role of the school psychologist is to evaluate children to determine the reasons for learning and behavior problems. According to Dr. Alessi, when a child has trouble learning or behaving in school, the source of the child's problem can usually be traced to one or more of five causes.

• First, the child may be misplaced in the curriculum, or the curriculum may include faulty teaching routines.
  
• Second, the teacher may not be implementing effective teaching and/or behavioral management practices.
  
• Third, the principal and/or other school administrators may not be implementing effective school management practices.
  
• Fourth, the parents may not be providing the home- based support necessary for effective learning.
  
• Fifth, the child may have physical and/or psychological problems that contribute to learning problems.
  

School psychologists from different areas of the country were interviewed and asked to complete an "informal survey." First, each school psychologist was asked if they agreed that the five factors listed above play a "primary role in a given school learning or behavior problem." (Page 148) The school psychologists agreed that these factors, alone or together, played a significant role in children's learning problems.

The school psychologists were surveyed about the number of children they evaluated during the past year for learning problems. The average number was about 120 cases (or kids). These numbers were rounded to 100 cases for each of the 50 psychologists for a total of 5,000 cases.

Alessi asked these psychologists how many reports they wrote in which they concluded that the child's learning problem was mainly due to curriculum factors. "The answer was usually none. All cases out of the 5,000 examined confirmed that their schools somehow had been fortunate enough to have adopted only the most effective basal curricula." (Page 148)

Next, he asked how many reports concluded that the referring problem was due primarily to inappropriate teaching practices. "The answer also was none. All cases out of the 5,000 examined proved that their districts had been fortunate enough to have hired only the most skilled, dedicated, and best prepared teachers in the land." (Page 149)

Then, he asked the psychologists how many of their reports found that the problem was due mainly to faulty school administrative factors. "The answer again was none. All cases out of 5,000 examined demonstrated that their districts had hired and retained only the nation's very best and brightest school administrators." (Page 149)

When asked how many reports concluded that parent and home factors were primarily responsible, the answer ranged from 500 to 1,000 (10% to 20%). These positive findings indicated that we were finally getting close to the source of educational problems in schools. Some children just don't have parents who are smart, competent, or properly motivated to help their children do well in school.

"Finally, I asked how many reports concluded that child factors were primarily responsible for the referred problem. The answer was 100%. These 5,000 positive findings uncovered the true weak link in the educational process in these districts: the children themselves.

If only these districts had better functioning children with a few more supportive parents, there would be no educational difficulties." (Page 149)

Alessi noted that in IEP disputes, "family factors are invoked most often when the parent does not attend the meeting, or if the parent is involved in a way deemed 'inappropriate' by the school staff. Otherwise, child factors alone seem to carry the explanatory burden for school learning and behavior problems." (Page 149)

Based on the results of these 5,000 reports prepared by school psychologists, "the results indicate clearly no need to improve curricula, teaching practices, nor school administrative practices and management. The only needs somehow involve improving the stock of children enrolled in the system, and some of their parents." [emphasis mine] (Page 149)

Alessi expressed serious concerns. If school psychologists always define children's learning problems as existing solely within the child, "it is equally unclear how school psychologists can help resolve this kind of problem. School psychologists seem to define school problems in ways that cannot be resolved."

When Dr. Alessi shared his results with the school psychologists, many protested that "all five factors are indeed responsible for school problems in the cases they studied, but that informal school policy (or 'school culture') dictates that conclusions be limited to child and family factors.

Many feel that they could lose their jobs were they to invoke school-related factors. Certainly, they claim, their professional lives would be made very uncomfortable . . . fact remains that no school psychologist in the group had determined that any existing problems were due to school-related factors." (Page 149)



The Child as the Problem

Alessi discussed several additional reasons for the prevailing "child- as- the- problem" perspective of school psychologists. Graduate school programs focus on child problems and ignore or exclude school-related factors. Workshops and papers presented at school psychology conferences share the "child- as- the- problem" focus. Most school psychology journals focus exclusively on child factors.

School psychology textbooks have a clear "child- as- the- problem" bias. After examining several "mainstream" school psychology texts, Alessi found that when assessing children's reading problems, school factors were mentioned as a factor between 7% and 0% (zero) of the time. "Child factors" were held responsible for reading problems between 90% to 100% of the time.

Citing a classic book on reading disability, Alessi noted that it included no chapters about the connection between reading problems and school factors. The entire book focused on "child factors." (Page 150)

The "child- as- the- problem" bias also pervades school psychology research and practice. Alessi referenced one work that presented an extensive review of the research on learning disabilities. "Of the approximately 1,000 studies reviewed, not one examined the relation between school factors and learning disabilities." (Page 150)

In conclusion, Alessi observed that "Parents trust school psychologists not to adopt assessment practices that are inherently biased in ways that could hinder, rather than help, their children." (Page 148)



"Ethical Burdens"

Dr. Alessi discussed the "ethical burdens" on school psychologists:

“As this body of research grows, school psychologists will increasingly face the burden of deciding whether they work for the schools or for the children, in cases where the interests clash." (Page 150)

“We end with a disccussion of the ethical burdens on school psychologists to be forthright and honest when reporting their findings.”

He posed some questions: (Page 150)

• Are we really helping children by concluding that children alone are responsible for their educational problems?
• "Are we helping the school system at the expense of the children?"
• "How do we balance the rights of those who pay for our services against those who receive our services, when interests clash?"
• "Is the role of the school psychologist to label children to help schools avoid improving faulty educational practices, or to help schools improve faulty educational practices to avoid labeling children?"

key words: blame the student school psychologist
Pamela Darr Wright summary of Galen Alessi study
Evolving Functions for the School Psychologist
Whose Fault Is It?
educational rights of special need children versus typical children
Engelmann on Galen Alessi study
Pamela Darr Wright posted to ktm
"public school has never been about outputs..."

-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Apr 2006

---

IowaTestOfBasicSkillsPartOne 11 Apr 2006 - 20:46 CatherineJohnson



Now that so many of our schools have dropped the norm-referenced tests they used to give in favor of the mysterious not-to-be-deciphered-by-mere-mortals annual state test, parents have even less sense of where their children stand in relation to their peers. A doctor friend of mine told me she studied math in college and statistics in med school - she did research before going into practice - and she has no clue what the NY test scores mean.

Talk about dead reckoning.

Awhile back Lone Ranger posted information about administering the ITBS to your own children, and I'm starting the process today. She writes about her experiences here and here.

I started homeschooling my daughter in August 2004. She had been in public school since kindergarten and was a rising 4th grader when we started homeschooling. She had suffered through 3 years of "Math Their Way" and then 1 year of "Everyday Math" before I woke up to the fact that she was not learning math well. Her third grade test scores showed her to be working at the 50% in math. Well, after one year of homeschooling using only Singapore Math Levels 2B- half of 4A and supplementing with Singapore Math's Intensive Practice her total math score on the Iowa Test of Basic skills is now at the 99%!! More importantly her confidence, fluency, and ability to work through difficult problems have gone through the ceiling as well. Happy 4th of July - Lone Ranger

Ed and I are watching this movie in reverse. Christopher isn't learning much math, and his confidence, fluency, and ability to work through difficult problems fall with each new 20-point deduction for failure to show all of his work. It's iatrogenic regression: loss of confidence caused by public schooling, not medical treatment.

RESEARCH SHOWS (in this case that much-abused phrase has meaning) that low-stakes formative assessment, aka assessment for learning, raises achievement.

Assessment for learning raises achievement because it tells the teacher and student what the student does and does not know.

So I'm getting started. I've just put in a call to Piedmont Education Services (got the phone machine) and I'm printing out the Iowa Test Administrator's Form (pdf file) from BJU Press.

I'm going to check 'yes' in the box for: I am willing to be contacted by home schoolers in my area who require the services of a test administrator.




This is the major source on formative assessment:

Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam


formative assessment in Hungary



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Apr 2006

---

InsideTheBlackBox 11 Apr 2006 - 21:14 CatherineJohnson


I've mentioned a number of times that Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, is the Core Text on the topic of formative assessment, or assessment for learning (AFL).

But I haven't actually read it - I hadn't managed to find a copy of it until yesterday.

I've just this moment taken a look at it, and it's going to be good:

In terms of systems engineering, present policies in the U.S. and in many other countries seem to treat the classroom as a black box. Certain inputs from the outside -- pupils, teachers, other resources, management rules and requirements, parental anxieties, standards, tests with high stakes, and so on -- are fed into the box. Some outputs are supposed to follow: pupils who are more knowledgeable and competent, better test results, teachers who are reasonably satisfied, and so on. But what is happening inside the box? How can anyone be sure that a particular set of new inputs will produce better outputs if we don't at least study what happens inside? And why is it that most of the reform initiatives ... are not aimed at giving direct help and support to the work of teachers in classrooms?

For anyone not familiar with the term 'black box,' the joke here is that for many, many years, in the field of behaviorism, the 'black box' was the brain. You couldn't get inside it, so you were supposed to study what you could see, which was behavior.

Classroom = Black box

I love it.

Bonus points: Phi Delta Kappan is the Bible of educators, and that's where this article was published. Our principal cites Phi Delta Kappan articles on constructivist math as The Last Word.

There can be no debate over constructivist math, because Phi Delta Kappan published an article saying 'that's the way to go.'

So.

When I show up bearing the Core Text on assessment for learning, which just so happens to have appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, I'm going to be hard to ignore.


-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Apr 2006

---

FormativeAssessmentInScotland 11 Apr 2006 - 23:30 CatherineJohnson







How far is Scotland from Irvington?






partnership?

with parents?

as opposed to, I'm very protective of my teachers?






Formative assessment is good for Homeland Security, too.


source:
Assessment in Scotland: "Assessment is for Learning" - Formative Assessment in a Coherent System (ppt presentation)


-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Apr 2006

---

BuildingMetacognitionThroughTrafficLights 14 Apr 2006 - 17:11 CatherineJohnson



I have to get to Scotland. (update below)



This is adorable:

Traffic lighting: A means of self-evaluating levels of confidence. Green means 'I can do this', amber means 'I'm reasonably confident', and red means 'I need assistance'. It is particularly effective when pupils are involved in establishing, or at least understand clearly, the criteria for success.

source:
traffic lighting

I'm going to have to go upstairs right this minute and read the book Ed gave me on the Scottish enlightenment.

Crowded with Genius

Christopher keeps telling me he's the only Protestant in town.

So now I'm thinking, we need more Scots. Formative assessment, when you think about it, is the perfect Scots-Irish grading system. It's anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, anti-taxation-without-representation — —

Wait.

Scratch that last one. I got carried away.

Christian, Jimmy's & Andrew's aide, who went through the Yonkers schools and lived to tell the tale, said tonight he's against grades. I am, too.

Christian says grades are like judges holding up scores at skating contests.

yup





update: Reading a comment from Steve, I realize this post is unclear.

My understanding of the traffic lights is that they aren't an assessment tool at all.

The traffic lights are a teaching tool for children, to help them identify whether they know something and how well they know it.

That's a big challenge for kids (we've talked about this often). It's a challenge for adults, too. Re-teaching myself pre-algebra, I'm still surprised at how often I think I know a concept or a procedure when I don't - and I'm paying attention! My default position is to assume that I don't have mastery. Even with this 'negative' bias, I'm not infrequently surprised to discover that not only do I not have mastery, I don't even have much in the way of novice status, either.

Knowing what you know and don't know is extremely challenging. Most of the time you can only find out what you know and don't know by testing yourself, which the traffic light system would teach children to do.




traffic lights and biofeedback

The traffic lights remind me of biofeedback.

When I was at Dartmouth, I was the Research Assistant for the psych department, so I was the student who demonstrated biofeedback to the big Psych 101 class.

The professor put electrodes all over my head, and told me that a tone would sound any time my brain produced alpha waves.

Alpha waves are produced when you close your eyes, so he had me close my eyes, and the sound went off.

Then he had me open my eyes and try to make the sound come on with my eyes open.

In other words, I was to produce alpha waves with my eyes open.

That turns out to be a very strange and unnatural thing to do, but I did it - and I did it amazingly fast. It really was startling.

My guess is that the traffic lights work as a particularly clear and simple form of feedback. If a child thinks he knows something very well, and has marked down a green light on his paper, and then finds out he doesn't know what he thinks he knows, I suspect this is going to be extremely helpful information.

Steve's right about 'traffic lights' as evaluation. I would be seriously unhappy to be getting home traffic lights as the only word on what my child knows and can do.

Of course, in some of Christopher's classes, traffic lights would be an improvement.


traffic lighting



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Apr 2006

---

FormativeAssessmentInGaelic 12 Apr 2006 - 18:22 CatherineJohnson






source:
What is an AifL School? (Gaelic version)


We definitely need more Scots around here.

Also some Australians.



-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Apr 2006

---

IndependentGeorgeAndDougAndOthersOnGrading 19 Apr 2006 - 17:57 CatherineJohnson



update below

People have left all kinds of helpful comments on grades and grading - thank you! I'm way too immersed in my own school situation to be thinking as clearly as I'd like....sigh.

This comment, from Independent George, was especially helpful to me when it comes to sorting out my own situation:

This is a point that's been brought up many times before, but one of the best things about math is its transparency. If I got 3 wrong on a 25 question test, I got an 88. If I disagree with the grade, it can be demonstrated with 100% certainty whether or not I answered the question correctly, and I'll know exactly what I did right/wrong. There are some exceptions to this, obviously (such as the other Ms. K's 'show all work' directive), but at least you know exactly where you are at all times.

For a subject like writing, I think transparency is even more important, even if it's more difficult to implement: because it is far more subjective than math, it is harder to agree on what a fair grade is. That, in turn, makes it even more important to know how the grades are determined - to see exactly what kind of work falls under each grade. I'm decidedly an inflation-hawk on grading, but that is premised on the assumption that (a) the grades are fair, (b) the grading proces is understandable, and (c) instruction is provided on how to improve. Take away any of those three conditions, and the grades stop being informative, and become punitive - as is the case in your situation.

I had one prof in college who was a notoriously harsh grader (and not just the letter grades - the comments were also rather... pointed), but allowed infinite re-writes on all his papers - even on the final. The caveat was that his expectations got incrementally higher with each re-write (the second re-write was generally the point of diminishing returns). I don't know if that sort of system is realistic on the middle-school level, but the philosophy seems right - high expectations and blunt assessments combined with the support to meet them.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing which was the genesis of progressive education. When grading is arbitrary and punitive, it becomes very tempting to get rid of them entirely. Portfolio assessments (which I think are horrible, for all the usual reasons) suddenly look like a great innovation.

I'll add that we seem to have a particularly bad situation in the U.S. when it comes to writing instruction. Ed has been peripherally involved in that arena for years, and says that's why entities like the Berkeley Writing Project got going in the first place. Nobody knows how to teach writing, nobody knows how to grade writing, etc.

When and if I learn more about this, I'll post. But I have to say, I'm sure he's right. When I first set out to reteach math to Christopher, it took me 5 seconds to track down the two best (or most popular) math curricula for homeschooling. Saxon Math and Singapore. (Some of the others may be fine - like Math U See, Miquon, etc. My point is: it didn't take long to figure out which ones were both the best and the most popular.)

I've been searching for 'the' writing curriculum for months now, and it doesn't seem to be out there. There are a couple of 'big' writing programs on the web, neither of which appeals to me; Verghis says Calvert's program may be quite good....and so on.

There isn't a Saxon Math of writing. There isn't a KUMON of writing.

It's very strange.

Here's Doug's comment:

The purpose of grades is to report progress, not to punish. (I understand that some teachers use grades differently; they are wrong to do so. Yes, that's argument by assertion; I'll defend my position if necessary.) This is true even if the student feels bad about the grade.

If I'm told by a track coach that my 65.5 second time on 400 meters is not good enough to make the team, that's reporting, not punishment. If I'm told that my 65.5% on a math test isn't good enough to pass a class, the situation is no different.

Sometimes you need to know that merely working hard isn't enough. Perhaps what you considered "working hard" isn't working hard enough, perhaps you need to work smart rather than hard, perhaps you don't have the aptitude.

The second issue in your statement, though is critical. Any grade other than "perfect" must include explicit or implicit advice on how to increase the grade.

On a math test that doesn't require work, the advice is implicit: "Get more problems correct". Again, this is analogous to the running example. There, the advice is "run faster". A good teacher should still be looking for individual and class trends, to find out what hasn't been taught well or learned well, of course.

When you shift to a more-subjective grading standard, however, you need to make your advice more explicit. A "C" paper should explicitly note what was done well and what should have been done better, and should provide advice for improvement. Of course, any concrete elements of a grading rubric should be provided before the first paper is turned in ("-1 point for each spelling error; -2 points for each grammatical error"). More abstract elements should be demonstrated with examples.

When you finish looking at a graded paper, there should never be a question about where the grade came from.

I have a problem with poorly executed grading, but I think well-executed grading is necessary.

Ed's been dealing with quite a lot of grading woe in his undergraduate course this semester. His students strongly expect to earn As, and pressure their T.A.'s pretty heavily. They also come to see Ed. They tend to dispute the T.A.'s grading as too harsh; from Ed they want to know what they can do to improve their work.

It's become such an issue that he's thinking of 'taking grades off the table' for the first half of next year's course. He may use a check, check-plus, check-minus system. He's also moving more and more to a formative assessment approach, in which students can rewrite and earn higher grades.

He said this morning that there's no question letter grades motivate smart students who are in a position to earn high grades. The system has to be 'rational,' meaning grades have to be based on qualities reasonable folks can perceive and agree are present, and a student has to perceive a (likely) pay-off for hard work. He also believes in rewarding effort.

He says that students who constantly get mediocre grades no matter what they do lose motivation to continue.

As for me, my thoughts probably won't cohere for awhile.

"Assessment for learning" is a no-brainer. Our schools should be doing formative assessment constantly.

Summative assessment - evaluating the state of a student's learning - is more confusing to me. You have to have it, but I don't know what the parameters are. What forms of summative assessment are most useful and when?

I'm just not sure about letter grades as the best form.

Do letter grades tell us what we need to know?

Probably not....

Would norm-referenced standardized testing be better?

I have no idea.



update from Carolyn Morgan

I loved Doug's comments. They just nailed it all the way through. ". . . There should be no question where the grade came from." That means that you, the teacher, will have no problem explaining and supporting what you are reporting to the student and to the parent. You get very few parent notes or emails. I've found that the parents support you so much better when your grading/reporting is explicit. They know exactly what to do to help their student at home. They enforce your "rules" on their own student because they know what you are expecting. They helps so much.

I agree absolutely. The one teacher whose grades make perfect sense to us is Ms. Tucci, Christopher's social studies teacher. (oops - That's an exaggeration. The Spanish teacher's grading is crystal clear; and the same is true of the science teacher, and of the English teacher on everything but writing.)

Back to Ms. Tucci: we can see, with each test that comes home, exactly what she's looking for - and we can see the difference between a good answer, a partial-credit answer, and a poor answer.

Not coincidentally, Christopher started the year with Bs in her class and has now worked up to an A+ on his last test.

On that test, he missed a 'trick' question asking about 'seas.' He defined 'sea' as including 'ocean' and chose an answer that included something about the Pacific Ocean, I think.

He learned from this! He was kind of tickled to see that she'd tricked him with the word 'sea.'

Ms. Tucci's expectations are clear, her grading is transparent and fair, and, as Carolyn points out, we don't give her any grief.

Moreover, Christopher is almost completely independent when it comes to her class. He knows how to read the text on his own (she's given them Guided Reading exercises) and he knows how to study on his own.

Ed still helps him study for tests, partly because he likes to; this is the interest he and Christopher share.

But he doesn't have to.

Good grading almost certainly leads to better learning and higher independence in the student.

repeating myself: I want to stress that social studies isn't an 'easy' course. Christopher wasn't doing that well in it at the beginning of the year; in fact he may have had a C or two. Christopher is getting good grades in Ms. Tucci's course because Ms. Tucci is a good teacher.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Apr 2006

---

WhatDoesAGoodSchoolLookLike 12 Apr 2006 - 20:30 CatherineJohnson




I've mentioned getting back in touch with an old friend whose kids are in what is probably one of the best private schools in the country.

I've been debriefing her, which naturally has had the effect of bringing into even sharper focus all of my frustrations with our school.

Last week I asked about the grading and assessment policy in her school.

Two things stood out:

1.
Her school performs huge quantities of formative assessment, or assessment for learning.

They use the ERB,^* which is the test private schools use. They can't use any of the norm-referenced tests public schools use, because the kids are all "in the 99th percentile."

They give the ERB four times a year. Then a team of learning specialists meets with the parents and goes over the results.

In one of her recent meetings, the learning specialists told her that her child's performance on unit conversions wasn't where it should be. They attributed this to the fact that the school hadn't taught the subject well.

They also found that her child's performance on prepositional phrases should be better than it was. In that case, they don't see a deficit in their teaching, but for further practice. They'll provide her child with a packet of practice materials for the summer, and when he returns to school he'll have the skill mastered. (They're confident of this, because they have specific information and data on all of their worksheets and textbooks.)

Now that is assessment for learning!

The goal is to find out what the child knows, connect what the child knows with the school's teaching practices and curriculum, and quickly remediate any gaps in the child's learning.

A couple of years ago, after reading a letter from a mom who discovered her child was two years behind public school kids on the placement test for private school, I was going to give Christopher the private school entrance exam. But then I found out it costs $400 or some such.

2.
The school does not assign letter grades. (I'll find out whether they do in middle school and high school.) They give the kids tons of tests and assignments, all of which are graded on a percent basis, which, my friend says, is the equivalent of a letter grade.

But they don't write letter grades on papers, or send home report cards with letter grades.





how far behind are public school kids?

The salient portion of the letter I mentioned above:

Most telling [after the introduction of TERC in NYC schools] was the progressive drop in students performing at Level 4 (the highest level) on the city-wide tests, culminating in a plunge of over 50% the year my son took the 4th-grade test.

Considering the amounts of taxpayer's money spent on these studies, it is criminal that this huge drop in higher achieving children's scores has not even been mentioned or noted in any NSF-founded research I have seen. In fact, it is now difficult to find any figures for NYC test scores that do not show Levels 3 and 4 combined, in effect, hiding this alarming fact.

In the fall of 2000, my child took the ISEE test (a test used for application to private schools). A public school, Level 4 "top 2 or 3 in his class of 130 children" math student placed mid-range. I was told by private school directors that this was consistent with what they were seeing with District 2 children.

Please remember that the TERC program moves very slowly as the children are all "finding their own solutions" without the benefit of using time-proven methods. When I looked at the ISEE test prep materials, I realized my child was almost 2 years behind ISEE standards for grade level and helped him catch up as much as possible, otherwise his score would have been even lower.

The Student Guide (pdf file) for the ISEE has 4 pages of sample questions towards the end of the guide. I'm going to see how Christopher does on them.





St. Anne's

Apparently, Jay Matthews says that St. Anne's, in Brooklyn, is the best private school in the country. (Haven't been able to track the column down, but I trust my source.)

I know two people who have kids in the school, so I'm going to start asking them what the school is like.





oh my gosh!

St. Anne's has a Monty Hall simulation!

OK, no doubt in my mind this is THE BEST PRIVATE SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY.


^* news flash: there is no test called 'the ERB'...


-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Apr 2006

---

NewsFromNowherePart3 26 Apr 2006 - 17:44 CatherineJohnson



email to the math chair:


Karen, I want to apologize for being hostile and short with you. That was wrong. I appreciate your patience.

A quick note about tutoring and parent reteaching. The reason I know parents are hiring tutors and reteaching content isn’t simply that parents tell me so.

I know because I have been reteaching other people’s children myself.

Here’s an example.

One day, during the run-up to the state tests, Ms. Kahl assigned her classes 4 word problems, numbers 8, 9, 10, and 11, from page 283 in Prentice-Hall.

I sat with Christopher & his friend ‘M.’ as they tried to do the problems. Neither boy knew where to begin.

I asked whether Ms. Kahl had taught them how to do similar problems in class. Both boys said, “No.” So I worked with them, guiding them through the problems, teaching the concepts and procedures.

The next day I asked Christopher and his friend whether Ms. Kahl had gone over the problems in class. She had gone over just one of the problems, the most difficult of the lot, #9. She had asked whether any of the students had trouble doing the problems, and the only problem the kids said they had difficulty with was #9.

I know for a fact that neither Christopher nor his friend M. could do the other 3 problems. But they didn’t say so in class.

This happens constantly with all children. It happens with college students, too. Ed has been a professor for 25 years. He says it’s axiomatic that you never ask a student whether he knows something. You can’t even ask a college student whether he understands something. The student will say ‘yes’ when the answer is no.

You must ask the student to show you what he knows and can do.

If we could simply ask students whether they do or do not know the material there would be no need for tests at all.

I understand that this is a new idea for public schools. It was a new idea for me when I began reading the literature on metacognition.

Because children don’t know what they do and do not know, adults must take responsibility for discovering what children have not learned and reteach that material.

That is the function Irvington parents and tutors are performing. We assess, we reteach, and we reassess. The school seldom hears about it, because the arrangement is taken for granted by parents as well as by teachers and administrators.

I’ll round up Carol Gambill’s article and forward it----and again, I’m sorry for giving you a hard time.

Catherine J.


cordial
email to the math teacher, part 1
Irvington Math Chair
follow-up to math chair
peer grading
extra credit

mathchair



-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Apr 2006

---

MetacognitionHaiku 05 May 2006 - 14:40 CatherineJohnson







source:
Instructional Design Intensive





from the same site —

• Table of Contents

• wholly inaccurate summaries of behaviorism and constructivism (scroll down)

• principles of netiquette

• Virginia Shea on netiquette

• Bloom's taxonomy; more Bloom; Bloom again (pdf file)

• constructivism on the web

• teacher-dominated & constructivist lessons online

• The Teacher as Guide or Preserver of the Archetype (constructivist proverbs)

from the site & useful, too

• Fair Use Guidelines

• a guide to peer-to-peer feedback

and a link to —

Chapter 4 Chapter Four of the McGraw-Hill textbook Multimedia Literacy, which includes a nifty chart filled with distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods about the respective natures of Teacher-Dominated and Cognitive Perspectives on Education:

Table 4-1. Comparison of the Teacher-Dominated and Cognitive Perspectives on Education

Teacher-Dominated Perspective	Cognitive Perspective
Teacher Centered	Learner Centered
Teachers Present Knowledge	Students Discover and Construct Knowledge
Students Learn Meaning	Students Create Meaning
Learner as Memorizer	Learner as Processor
Learn Facts	Develop Learning Strategies
Rote Memory	Active Memory
Teacher Structures Learning	Social Interaction Provides Instructional Scaffolding
Repetitive	Constructive
Knowledge Is Acquired	Knowledge Is Created
Teacher Provides Resources	Students Find Resources
Individual Study	Cooperative Learning and Peer Interaction
Sequential Instruction	Adaptive Learning
Teacher Manages Student Learning	Students Learn to Manage Their Own Learning
Students Learn Others' Thinking	Students Develop and Reflect on Their Own Thinking
Isolationist	Contextualist
Extrinsic Motivation	Intrinsic Motivation
Reactive Teachers	Proactive Teachers
Knowledge Transmission	Knowledge Formation
Teacher Dominates	Teacher Observes, Coaches, and Facilitates
Mechanistic	Organismic
Behavioralist	Constructivist

wrong wrong wrong





National Research Council says —

A common misconception regarding “constructivist” theories of knowing (that existing knowledge is used to build new knowledge) is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This perspective confuses a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivists assume that all knowledge is constructed from previous knowledge, irrespective of how one is taught (e.g., Cobb, 1994) —even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.

source:
How People Learn, p 11 National Academies Press
National Research Council
National Academies of Science
about National Academies Press

-- CatherineJohnson - 04 May 2006

---

TheSongOfTheAmazonBird 11 May 2006 - 22:32 CatherineJohnson



Still on my Quest, I've come across this reader review of Daybook of Critical Reading and Writing by Fran Claggett:

My Opinion..., April 14, 2002
Reviewer: A reader
The reason I gave this book two stars, is because we use this book in our class all of the time. Most of the stories and poems in here are hard to understand and complicated.

I know that you are supposed to use your mind, and there is no right or wrong answer, but you can not use your mind if you dont know what is going on. I keep getting zero's on my daybook assignments, because all I can put in the margins or the pages to write what you think, is that I can't write anything because it was hard to understand, so I get zero's for not understanding, and that to me isnt fair! So, I think that if to this book you tell your opinion, I think that if your opinion is that you didnt understand it, than that should still be counted as "no right or wrong answer".

But besides that, it is a good idea.

Was this review helpful to you? 



Yes.

This review was helpful to me.

This review helped me to remember that actually teaching content and skills is the proper goal of schools.


the song of the Amazon bird
the song of the Amazon bird, part 2
the song of the Amazon bird, part 3



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 May 2006

---

BasBraamsStandardizedTestPage 17 May 2006 - 22:55 CatherineJohnson



Via my usual circuitous route (I started out looking for the IB summer reading list for Dobbs Ferry Middle School) I have come upon Bas Braams' page, Looking for Content Reviews of Standardized Assessments.

It's going to be helpful.





Supertest

Jay Matthews' book on International Baccalaureate is out. It's coming in the mail.

The Dobbs Ferry Middle School, which is closer to my house than our own middle school, has an IB program.

Irvington doesn't have an IB program, but on the other hand, Dobbs Ferry doesn't have differentiated instruction. You can't have everything.





update

OK, I was wrong. (pdf file)

Apparently you can have everything.





number 49

Interesting.

Dobbs Ferry High School ranks 49th thanks to its IB program.

Christopher's brilliant 5th grade teacher, Ms. Duque, went to an IB high school. She said it was hard as he**, but she was incredibly well-educated.

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 May 2006

---

SixthGradeInIrvingtonPartTwo 13 Jun 2006 - 15:36 CatherineJohnson







The Sixth Grade Guide to Success, which has recently been posted to edline, includes the first formal statement of IMS grading policy I've seen:





So there it is. Summative assessment all the live-long day. Summative assessment and, apparently, grading on a curve. This in a town filled with highly educated, high achieving parents; the student body skews wildly to the intelligent and capable. "Truly exceptional work on a consistent basis," defined within this cohort, means that children who are doing work that is merely excellent or good will receive Bs, Cs, and Ds.

Which they routinely do. A friend of mine told me her 6th grader just got back his Spanish "project." He'd spent a lot of time on it, and was proud of what he'd done. I saw it in an early stage and thought it was great. Spanish is my second language, so I could see that his spelling and vocabulary were correct.

Grade: 64.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible Irvington Middle School teachers aren't grading on a curve. It's possible Irvington Middle School teachers are grading our children's work against an absolute standard known only to them. ("I am not at liberty to share examples of excellent student work.")

It's possible, but how would I know?

I wouldn't. Parents have no idea what the curriculum is, how student work is graded, why a Spanish "project" with correct spelling and vocabulary is a "64," or why a Spanish student is spending his time cutting and pasting a Spanish "project" in the first place.

We take it all on faith.

No re-takes, either. Re-takes may be fine for the college boards. They're out of the question for Irvington Middle School, a US-govt recognized School of Excellence (pdf file, p. 57) back in 1986.

The exceptional person is exceptional on the first try. If you flunked the test, too bad. The parade moves on.

We're the tightrope school.





formative versus summative assessment (Princeton Review)
formative and summative assessment (Central Michigan University)



-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Jun 2006

---

SummerSchool2006 03 Jul 2006 - 19:43 CatherineJohnson




Still getting my act together on the summer program around here.

Andrew's set. He's doing KUMON Math and, as of today, KUMON Reading.

Amazing KUMON moment this week: I took a set of worksheets to school to show Andrew's teacher & aide how well he does with them.

Good thing I did, because they had no idea whether Andrew can or cannot do beginning addition. The answer is that he can, and they're the ones who taught him. They were blown away when they saw him whiz through a sheet of add-ones problems. The problems were sufficiently mixed that it was clear he understood the principle; x + 1 means the next number up from x.

The sheets I'd brought in had problems in the 30s, I think (30 + 1, 32 + 1, etc.). After he did a few of those I skipped ahead to the last sheet in the stack. The final problem was:


1000 + 1 =


Andrew frowned at this and hesitated.

Then he typed "1000" on the AlphaSmart.

I was mortified. I figured this was the moment where his teacher and aide would decide he was just learning by rote.

But I was wrong. They were both watching him intently. I said, "No, 1000 plus 1."

Andrew hadn't stopped frowning at the problem, which I think is part of what had his teachers so interested.

He reached out his hand, and deleted the final zero, then typed in '1.'

1001

They couldn't believe it. The mistake was what convinced them he knew what he was doing. I don't know whether they've seen him self-correct before; they probably have.

But watching him self-correct while doing a brand-new problem no one's ever shown him was the magic.

As impressed as they were, they stilll wanted to know whether Andrew could add ones if you wrote them in a different way, on a different kind of paper. This is the "hyper-specificity" problem that's so frustrating with autistic kids, and that is the center of Animals in Translation. The reason they were so frustrated with his progress in class, apparently, is that his performance is inconsistent – and the inconsistency seems to be related to changing fonts or paper, etc.

I’d never checked to make sure Andrew could do the same problems in different fonts and on different size paper (which I should have).

They gave me a sheet of paper, and I hand-wrote a ones problem.

Andrew answered it instantly.

They were convinced.

They were so convinced that they said they wanted to use KUMON as Andrew’s math curriculum this summer.

We talked about what the problem might be for awhile, and none of us knows. I'm guessing the problem is that the school doesn’t have a math curriculum for Andrew, mainly because there isn’t one, although KUMON may serve.

Clarice ordered Engelmann’s DISTAR program back when she was hired, and she gave it to me to take home. I got to spend two days holding the Presentation Book in my hands (I wish Ken had been there!) It looked like everything it’s cracked up to be, but it didn’t look like something a teacher could do with Andrew. I suppose you could type the script and have Andrew read it....which might be a good idea. I had to return the program the next day, and didn’t have enough time to think it through.

What's happening in class is that Andrew will seem to have mastered an addition fact, but then later on will seem to have lost it.

For the time being, I'm assuming that because they don't have a curriculum any one or all of 3 things has happened:

• they aren't teaching the math facts coherently

• they haven't given him enough distributed practice

• they haven't given him enough massed practice

As to the first, KUMON's worksheets are the ultimate coherent curriculum. The child does many, many worksheets on adding one to a number before moving on to add 2s to a number.

KUMON doesn't stop with the within-ten addition facts, either. Instead it takes the child all the way from 1 + 1 to 1000 + 1 before moving on to + 2. Clarice hasn't done that, I don't think. I think she had him learn all the various addition facts up to 10.

She said Andrew will seem to have mastered 6 + 4 = 10, but then when they ask him 6 + 4 a week later, he doesn't know.

I'm hoping the reason he forgets 6 + 4 is that 6 + 4 doesn't have the meaning it's going to have in KUMON.

I'm also wondering whether "massed practice" — aka drill and kill — may be especially important or even critical for developmentally disabled kids. Everyone in the U.S., constructivists & cognitive scientists alike, seems to have decided that distributed practice is the key to the kingdom. (TRAILBLAZERS & EVERYDAY MATH both claim to give children distributed practice.)

But I've always found I need to do a certain amount of massed practice in the beginning just to remember a concept well enough to be able to do distributed practice. Andrew is tough to deal with; I bet they haven't made him sit in a chair and do the same addition problems over and over again the way KUMON does. I wouldn't have.

In any case, we're moving on to +2 in a couple of days, so at that point I'll start occasionally asking him to do a +1 problem to see if he remembers.

We'll see.

As to KUMON reading, this morning Andrew was aghast at the discovery that in addition to the 5 KUMON math pages he has to do every day he now has 5 KUMON reading pages, too.

heh





summer school for Christopher

First off, I've had my second abject failure in afterschooling books: Sentence Composing for Middle School: A Worktext on Sentence Variety and Maturity by Don Killgallon.

I love this book — I even bought the college level one for me — and it's worthless for Christopher. The first exercises ask you to divide a sentence up at its natural breaks. For instance:

The only way to / keep your health is to eat what / you don't want drink / what you don't like and do what you'd / rather not.
- Mark Twain

The student is supposed to rewrite the sentence putting the slashes where they belong.

Christopher can't do it. He's so far away from being able to do it that he doesn't even really get what he's supposed to be doing. The whole thing makes no sense to him at all.

I thought he'd start to get the hang of it after awhile, but he didn't. He doesn't have an "ear."

Some kids do. My friend Kris's little guy, Charlie, has an ear. I went over one day & he came running up to show me something he'd written. He was missing a comma, and when I pointed it out he stopped in his tracks and talked the sentence to himself under his breath, and he heard where the comma was supposed to go. "Oh yeah!" he said, looking happy.

My other afterschooling flop was Daily Paragraph Editing, which I was using in 5th grade. I pushed Christopher through pages & pages of that book without his performance improving a jot. Finally I talked to his teacher, the brilliant Ms. Duque, and she said forget it. The book wasn't teaching him anything.

I interpret these failures to be more grist for the direct instruction mill. Christopher needs to be directly taught punctuation and grammar. Period. Then he'll have an ear.

I think he will, too. We've finished Megawords Book 3, and his ELA teacher, the other Ms. K, has been giving spelling tests all winter and spring. Ms. Duque taught spelling, too. So he's had a lot of spelling.

Suddenly, Christopher is using spelling rules to spell words he doesn't know, and he's getting them right, too. Boy is that great.

His spelling is so much better, it's amazing. Back in 3rd grade his spelling was A SCANDAL. It was almost psychotically bad, like those jokes about Eastern European languages with no vowels. These days he's starting to have normal not great spelling. In one paragraph of prose he might have two misspelled words, and those words will be misspelled logically.

This is why I'm sure he'll develop an "ear." He's developed whatever the analogous form of implicit knowledge is for spelling; he'll do it for writing, too.





vocabulary, writing, math...

So we're putting Killgallon on the shelf for the time being. Christopher will do Vocabulary Workshop, a book I like more and more as we go along. He does one page a day, which takes 5 minutes max. VW teaches words in 5 exercises:

• definitions — dictionary definition with sample sentences; student writes the word in the blank

• complete the sentence

• synonyms

• antonyms

• choosing the right word (student chooses which of two words on the vocabulary list "satisfactorily completes" a sentence)

• vocabulary in context — prose passage
  

There are 15 units in the book, and you review every three units. 20 words per list; 185 pages in the book. Efficient & effective.


We're big on vocabulary these days. At dinner I make Christian and Christopher learn Greek and Latin roots from English from the Roots Up. So far we've learned photos, graph, tele, metron, tropos, philia, phobos (predictable hilarity with metron, which instantly suggests the neologism metronsexual, philia & phobos), syn, and thesis, although Christian is having a horrible time remembering tropos. For quite a while there he was saying "line" whenever he heard it (too long to explain), so "line" has now become a running gag.

I told Christian to come up with a mnemonic device for tropos, but unfortunately the one he came up with caused him to start thinking tropos means revolving, which come to think of it maybe it does. (Does it?)

If anyone has a suggestion for a mnemonic device that connects tropos to turning, let me know.


I've also got an ancient copy of Word Power Made Easy (a Google Master recommendation, IIRC) next to the dining room table, so we may get to it, too, one of these days.

Then last week Martine went out and bought a dictionary of New York slang, and we all learned the meaning of ace boon coon, a phrase Christian knew and had used. I'm having as much trouble remembering ace boon coon as he is remembering tropos (I can't remember the "ace" part), so we'll see who gets to the finish line first.

Christopher is supposed to take his ALEKS placement test today, so I've got to go figure that out. More later.
















my boon companion



-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006

---

AleksAssessmentComingRightUp 27 Jun 2006 - 13:24 CatherineJohnson




9:24 and I'm back from walking to camp; plus I've done 2 sets of KUMON worksheets.

Life is good!

Next up: my ALEKS assessment. Assuming I get the site to work OK (that's not a given; my browser's been crashing a lot), Christopher will take his after camp.

So we'll see.



ALEKS
ALEKS: a better state of knowledge

a parent's experience with ALEKS
ALEKS Graphic
formative assessment on wheels
ParentPundit uses ALEKS to fix Everyday Math
ALEKS question
ALEKS assessment coming right up



-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jun 2006

---

AleksAssessmentQuestion 29 Jun 2006 - 20:27 CatherineJohnson




hoo boy

2 hours later, and I've reached question #15 on my ALEKS assessment.

Since I'm not sure whether the program gives the answers at the end, can someone work this problem for me?

I'm not sure about the correct answer business, because I think I'm doing a "free trial assessment" and the site said something about not giving answers on free trial assessments, though maybe they meant not giving the answers midstream.

On the other hand, I'm also pretty sure I've signed up and paid for a monthly subscription.

Which wasn't the plan.



Here's the problem:

They want you to give a quotient and a remainder.

Which is depressing, because while I think I have the correct answer (we'll see), I have no idea how to translate it into a quotient and a remainder.

sigh

Thanks.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jun 2006

---

DebunkingTheDebunkers 29 Jun 2006 - 20:49 CatherineJohnson

The claim that slipping scores result from a changed demographic (and hence could even be good news) has surfaced repeatedly in the writings of education commentators such as Gerald Bracey, but it is demonstrably false. Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson summarized the matter in a 1994 column by noting: "The change in the student population preceded the drop in test scores. Between 1951 and 1963, the number of test takers went from 81,000 to nearly 1 million; test scores rose slightly.” Moreover, the percentage of test takers remained relatively constant between 1972 and 1984 (see Figure 1). There were still a million test takers in 1985, the first year in which test scores showed a small uptick after 19 years of decline. Scores have been flat or slightly improved since then, with math scores returning to their levels of 30 years ago, but failing to reach their mid-1960s apex.

Changes in the composition of the test-taking pool don’t explain the decline in test scores either. Studies by the Educational Testing Service and others have showed, in the words of Robert Samuelson, that “the main declines occurred among whites and could not be explained by changes in student’s gender, economic class, or parental education.” This analysis was seconded by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, who pointed out that the SAT scores of advantaged white males have also exhibited a steep decline.

source:
Waiting for Utopia
by David W. Murray

This line bears repeating:

[T]he SAT scores of advantaged white males have also exhibited a steep decline.

I don't know whether this is true of advantaged females as well. I assume so.

I'm no strategist, but speaking as parent I think the meme of nightmare-schools-in-the-city/good-schools-in-the-suburbs is doing more harm than good.

What makes suburban schools "good"?

Sadly, (now that I know that I don't know grammar I'm pretty sure 'sadly' doesn't modify what I think it does) .... starting over: I am sorry to say that I seem to have lost track of the study of suburban school financing I came across the other day.

IIRC, it compared districts with different levels of school spending but the same level student body SES.

Upshot: no difference in scores. (I'll do some Googling pretty soon here.)

If Ed Sector types wish to carry on focusing exclusively on achievement gaps, then at a minimum they ought to include the TIMSS & PISA data in white papers & pronouncements.

Black & Hispanic kids are way behind white kids.

But white kids are way behind everyone else. Black & Hispanic kids are behind the kids who are already behind.




rogue's gallery

In the rogue's gallery of edu-apologists, Richard Rothstein is a standout:

Yet Rothstein, exactly one year later, parroted his earlier claims. His reaction to the release of the 2001 scores, which showed no improvement over the previous year and hence were termed “stable” by the College Board, was to write, “Stable in this case does not mean unimproved. Hidden in the data is more hopeful news than most people would expect. These tests are voluntary. If only high achievers take them, average scores mean one thing. But if a broader range of students takes them, the results must be interpreted differently. The number taking the tests has in fact grown a lot. . . . It is remarkable that averages gained at all while the test-taking base was expanding.”

Passing off lousy SAT scores as a sign of progress takes nerve.

So does this:

A Japanese scholar is also invoked [by Rothstein] to assure us that his countrymen do “not attach great importance to students’ rankings because the exams measure skills valued by the old education system, not the new.” In fact, Rothstein concludes, the dour Japanese want to emulate our schools because of our “zest for living.”

In a July 2001 column, Rothstein tells his readers not to fret over data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showing that two-thirds of American 4th graders can’t read above a basic level, because “on an international survey of reading ability, American 4th graders scored higher than pupils everywhere except Finland.” In other words, international comparisons are apparently valid when they corroborate Rothstein’s fundamental beliefs, but easily dismissed when they reflect poorly on the American education system.

We are a zesty lot, we math illiterates!




What Money Can't Buy

I've never heard of this book! —

...the University of Chicago’s Susan Mayer undertook a far more comprehensive analysis of the relationship of income to school achievement in a 1997 book, What Money Can’t Buy. She examined nearly 17,000 records in two massive data sets in her search for the true effects of income. The study is important for its methodological sophistication and its conclusions, which take us beyond the traditional left-right political axis regarding welfare programs and the causes of poverty.

Mayer showed that income per se is not a consequential factor in children’s performance. Beyond providing the ability to satisfy basic needs like food and shelter, income is not a necessary, much less a sufficient, explanation of children’s academic achievement. Mayer found that a supportive family structure (a stable, two-parent home), a culture of learning within the family and neighborhood, and natural abilities were much more important than income. Given these factors, income can certainly help people achieve their ends. In their absence, however, income is largely inconsequential.

Tom Fischgrund, who interviewed 160 of the 541 "perfect 1600" kids from the year 2000, found that 90% of them had intact families, compared to 66% of high school students overall.




meet the parents, part 2

In a May 2001 column, Rothstein lamented the fact that teachers are assigning more homework, which is said to be “up 50 percent in the last two decades.” This is a problem, Rothstein believes, because it “may increase the gap between students from middle-class and low-income homes. With growing inequality now a greater danger than middle-class pupils’ inadequate achievement, policies that widen learning differences should be avoided.”

Rothstein cites an academic authority to reinforce the claim, quoting University of North Carolina professor Eugene Brooks, who says, “Because of homework, schools either consciously or unconsciously reproduce social inequality. It can be avoided only if teachers take over homework supervision from parents.” That’s a somewhat breathtaking mission for the school—reducing the impact of social class on learning by expunging parents from the equation, since they are unequal in their degree of helpfulness. It is apparently better for all youngsters to languish in dreary study halls—presumably reducing the amount of time left for instruction—than to take the risk that one mother might help her child learn faster than another.

wow

And here I thought I was being all wild-eyed and radical saying the reason suburban schools are good is the parents do the (re)teaching.

But no.

What folks like Rothstein really ought to do, if they want to prevent white kids learning more than black kids, is make it illegal for parents to hire moonlighting teachers from their kids' school.

Somehow I don't see Rothstein & his chums signing on for that one.




distributed practice

I'm going to practice this one to mastery:

“Because of homework, schools either consciously or unconsciously reproduce social inequality. It can be avoided only if teachers take over homework supervision from parents.”


meet the parents (big-time tutoring)
debunking the debunkers (Rothstein; What Money Can't Buy)
how much reading each day?

Irvington tutors
Irvington tutors, part 2

SATdecline
Irvingtontutors



-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Jun 2006

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AleksAssessmentResults 30 Jun 2006 - 00:35 CatherineJohnson




arithmetic

The good news is, I'm officially done with arithmetic.

The fact that ALEKS calls arithmetic "arithmetic" is a point in its favor.








algebra

I found the algebra assessment incredibly hard, leading me to wonder whether I was taught any algebra at all in the two years I "studied" the subject back in high school. I'm 65 lessons into Saxon Algebra 1, a combined algebra-geometry text with 120 lessons in all, and a lot of the material in the book is new to me.

I think the ALEKS assessment is a vindication of Saxon. For one thing, I was able to figure out how to do all kinds of polynomial factoring I've never seen or done before, including in Saxon. That is, 65 lessons of Saxon Algebra 1 gave me a strong base from which to figure out new problems. I did some guessing and checking, but it was informed guessing and checking.

Sometimes I could just "see" what the factors had to be, thanks to Saxon.

Here's the ALEKS assessment:







I think the reference to "grade 6" comes from me, not from ALEKS. I asked the program to assess me for Grade 6; then I asked it to assess me for algebra. Today when I asked it to assess Christopher for grade 6 & for pre-algebra, ALEKS called pre-algebra "grade 6."

So I don't think "Algebra 1" is what ALEKS thinks kids should (necessarily) be taking in 6th grade.




50% Saxon Algebra 1 = 80% ALEKS Algebra 1?

Have I got that right?

All of the Saxon books open with a great deal of review, and end with difficult material (the book advises teachers to schedule the school year accordingly). If you assume that at least the first 20 lessons of Saxon (more like 30) are review, that means it's more accurate to say that I've completed 45 lessons out of 100.

So....with 45% of Saxon Algebra 1 under my belt, I correctly answered 100 out of 125 ALEKS assessment items.

Seems pretty good to me.

update: I've also worked my way through most of Mary Dolciani's chapter on graphing functions in a coordinate plane.


So let's see how Christopher fared with Prentice Hall Pre-algebra taught by Ms. K, shall we?



Singapore placement test results
ALEKS



-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Jun 2006

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HowMuchReadingADay 22 Oct 2006 - 21:25 CatherineJohnson




The best readers in 5th grade spend an hour a day reading books —





By the time a child reaches the middle grades he or she must read in order to develop his vocabulary —




I particularly like the finding that college graduates use a spoken vocabulary only slightly more sophisticated than that found in books written for preschoolers.

I believe it.

source:
Reading Can Make You Smarter
by Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich
PRINCIPAL volume 83 number 2, November/December 2003 » page(s) 34-39



Examples of words that do not appear in two large
corpora of oral language (Berger, 1977; Brown, 1984) but
that have appreciable frequencies in written texts
(Carroll, Davies & Richman, 1971;
Francis & Kucera, 1982):

display            literal
dominance       legitimate
dominant         luxury
exposure         maneuver
equate            participation
equation          portray
gravity            provoke
hormone         relinquish
infinite            reluctantly
invariably      


WHAT READING DOES FOR THE MIND
BY ANNE E.CUNNINGHAM AND KEITH E. STANOVICH
AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
SPRING/SUMMER 1998

E.D. Hirsch has been quoting Keith Stanovich's & Ann Cunningham's research:

Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.
Cunningham AE, Stanovich KE.

A group of 1st-graders who were administered a battery of reading tasks in a previous study were followed up as 11th graders. Ten years later, they were administered measures of exposure to print, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and general knowledge. First-grade reading ability was a strong predictor of all of the 11th-grade outcomes and remained so even when measures of cognitive ability were partialed out. First-grade reading ability (as well as 3rd- and 5th-grade ability) was reliably linked to exposure to print, as assessed in the 11th grade, even after 11th-grade reading comprehension ability was partialed out, indicating that the rapid acquisition of reading ability might well help develop the lifetime habit of reading, irrespective of the ultimate level of reading comprehension ability that the individual attains. Finally, individual differences in exposure to print were found to predict differences in the growth in reading comprehension ability throughout the elementary grades and thereafter.

Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.
Cunningham AE, Stanovich KE.
Dev Psychol. 1997 Nov;33(6):934-45.

from Cunningham's & Stanovich's American Educator article (pdf file):

In several studies, we have attempted to link children’s reading volume to specific cognitive outcomes after controlling for relevant general abilities such as IQ. In a study of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children, we examined whether reading volume accounts for differences in vocabulary development once controls for both general intelligence and specific verbal abilities were invoked (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1991).

[snip]

[W]e found that even after accounting for general intelligence and decoding ability, reading volume contributed significantly and independently to vocabulary knowledge in fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children.

[snip]

In a study we conducted involving college students, we employed an even more stringent test of whether reading volume is a unique predictor of verbal skill (Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992). In this study we examined many of the same variables as in our study of fourth- to sixth-grade students. However, we decided to stack the deck against reading volume by first removing any contribution of reading ability and general intelligence.

[snip]

We found that reading volume made a significant contribution to multiple measures of vocabulary, general knowledge, spelling, and verbal fluency even after reading comprehension ability and nonverbal ability had been partialed out.

the Practical Knowledge Test

[I]n the Practical Knowledge Test, we made an effort to devise questions that were directly relevant to daily living in a technological society in the late twentieth century; for example, What does the carburetor tor in an automobile do? If a substance is carcinogenic, it means that it is __? After the Federal Reserve Board raises the prime lending rate, the interest that you will be asked to pay on a car loan will generally increase/ decrease/stay the same? What vitamin is highly concentrated in citrus fruits? When a stock exchange is in a “bear market,”what is happening? and so forth. The results indicated that the more avid readers in our study—regardless of their general abilities—knew more about how a carburetor worked, were more likely to know who their United States senators were, more likely to know how many teaspoons are equivalent to one tablespoon,were more likely to know what a stroke was, and what a closed shop in a factory was, etc. One would be hard pressed to deny that at least some of this knowledge is relevant to living in the United States in the late 20th century.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me.

His wife was and is a severe dyslexic, and sometime after they married he realized that she knew almost nothing about the random dumb stuff the rest of us waste time shmoozing about at parties.

For instance, she had no idea who Kato Kaelin was.

This was back when Kaeto Kaelin was new.

I asked him, "Doesn't she watch TV?"

She did.

She was a smart, educated person who basically couldn't read and who watched TV.

Apparently the amount of information you can get from TV is pretty limited.



TV and the "cognitive autonomy" of misinformation

In other questions asked of these same students,we attempted to probe areas that we thought might be characterized by misinformation. We then attempted to trace the “cognitive anatomy” of this misinformation.

69.3 percent of our sample thought that there were more Jewish people in the world than Moslems. This level of inaccuracy is startling given that approximately 40 percent of our sample of 268 students were attending one of the most selective public institutions of higher education in the United States (the University of California, Berkeley).

[Correct] scores among the group high in reading volume and low in television exposure were highest, and the lowest scores were achieved by those high in television exposure and low in reading volume.

The cognitive anatomy of misinformation appears to be one of too little exposure to print (or reading) and over-reliance on television for information about the world. Although television viewing can have positive associations with knowledge when the viewing is confined to public television, news, and/or documentary material (Hall, Chiarello, & Edmondson, 1996;West & Stanovich, 1991;West et al., 1993), familiarity with the primetime television material that defines mass viewing in North America is most often negatively associated with knowledge acquisition.

reading makes everyone smarter

[W]e observed that firstgrade intelligence measures do not uniquely predict eleventh-grade reading volume in the same way. Thus, this study showed us that an early start in reading is important in predicting a lifetime of literacy experience— and this is true regardless of the level of reading comprehension ability that the individual eventually attains.

This is a stunning finding because it means that students who get off to a fast start in reading are more likely to read more over the years, and, furthermore, this very act of reading can help children compensate for modest levels of cognitive ability by building their vocabularly and general knowledge. In other words, ability is not the only variable that counts in the development of intellectual functioning. Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence; that is, reading will make them smarter.

I think this may answer a question I asked years ago: are early readers better readers?

I became interested in this when the principal of our grade school in Studio City told parents that it didn't matter if their children were slow learning to read. Everyone learns to read eventually, she said; the timing doesn't matter.

That struck me as unlikely given what I knew about tennis prodigies and musical prodigies and the like, who start young. Also, I'd taught myself to read earlier than the kids in my town learned to read. I think I must have learned to read the summer before first grade, which isn't especially young for a lot of ktm commenters, I realize, but was young for my school where reading instruction started in first grade. I entered first grade able to read proficiently all of the books we would use for the next 9 months. I was a year ahead, and this gap never went away. I read earlier than my peers, and 11 years later I was a better reader than my peers. I think Stanovich's research would probably predict that outcome; early reading leads to better reading. I think. I've just read a couple of his abstracts thus far, so I don't know.

In any event, Stanovich's & Cunninghams' research does show that reading early and reading a lot matter.



perfect SATs

From 1600 Perfect Score: The 7 Secrets of Acing the SAT by Tom Fischgrund, who inteviewed 160 of the 541 "perfect 1600" SAT scorers in the year 2000:

[S]tudents who ace the SAT read an average of fourteen hours a week. Average score students, on the other hand, read only eight hours a week—an immense drop-off. The biggest difference, however, was found in the amount of time students spent reading for school. Average score students spent four hours a week reading literature, textbooks, and other assigned reading for school. Perfect score students put in nine hours a week for school-assigned reading, more than double the amount of time.

[snip]

What do 1600 students read for fun?...The book most frequently mentioned—by a total of 6 percent of perfect score students—was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading each day?
Vocabulary Workshop
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day



-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

---

WordForTheDay 06 Aug 2006 - 00:38 CatherineJohnson





BLOB



-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Aug 2006

---

FifteenWordsADay 09 Aug 2006 - 17:53 CatherineJohnson




Reading E.D. Hirsch, I'm finally understanding why teachers & administrators who know what they're talking about constantly push parents to read to their children and children to read to themselves:

A well educated 12th-grader knows an enormous number of words, mostly learned incidentally. But, there is also an important place for explicit vocabulary development, especially in the early years, and especially for children who are behind. Isabel Beck and her colleagues13 in their excellent guide to explicit vocabulary instruction estimate that students can be taught explicitly some 400 words per year in school. (See “Taking Delight in Words” on page 36 for an example of such instruction.) These 400 words can be of immense importance to those children who are behind and need to be brought to the point of understanding key words as fast as possible. But that is just the beginning. If we want all of our children to comprehend well, they must learn many, many more words each year through incidental means. A 12th-grade student who scores well enough on the verbal portion of the SAT to get into a selective college knows between 60,000 and 100,000 words. There is some dispute among experts regarding the actual number so we might split the difference and assume that the number is about 80,000 words. If we assume that a child starts acquiring vocabulary at age two, and that the 12th-grader is 17 years old, he has acquired 80,000 words in 15 years. Multiplying 365 days times 15 we get 5,475 days. We divide that number into 80,000, and we find that the high-achieving 12th-grader has learned some 15 words a day—over 5,000 words a year. But of course, the 15-words-a-day estimate is just a mathematical average that describes a haphazard and complex process occurring along a very broad front.

source:
Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge—of Words and the World
American Educator
Spring 2003

the magical number 12

After 3rd or 4th grade, most of these new words have to come from a child's reading material, because he's already learned all the words grownups use in speech.

Steven Stahl summarizes what we know about how children - and adults - acquire new words:

Ordinarily, when we encounter a word we don’t know, we skip it, especially if the word is not needed to make sense of what we are reading (Stahl, 1991). But we remember something about the words that we skip. This something could be where we saw it, something about the context where it appeared, or some other aspect. This information is in memory, but the memory is not strong enough to be accessible to our conscious mind. As we encounter a word repeatedly, more and more information accumulates about that word until we have a vague notion of what it “means.” As we get more information, we are able to define that word. In fact, McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found that while four encounters with a word did not reliably improve reading comprehension, 12 encounters did.

source:
How Words Are Learned Incrementally Over Time
by Steven A. Stahl American Educator
Spring 2003

I just took a quick look at Christopher's copy of Vocabulary Workshop Level A. The word "adverse," in Unit 2, appears 6 times in 6 different contexts. Then it appears 3 times more in the Review unit.

So once Christopher is finished with Level A, he just needs to see all 300 words again 3 more times apiece, probably. That seems like a good deal to me. I'm going to have Christopher do the entire VW series, and I'm going to consider adding Wordly Wise to the mix. I've already purchased a very nice little programmed instruction vocabulary book by community college professor George Feinstein: Programmed College Vocabulary: Compact Edition (7th Edition). It's only 176 pages, so I assume the non-compact edition would be better. But Amazon had the compact edition, so that's the one I ordered.

I still want to know whether teaching Greek and Latin roots gives you a leg up. If I knew that it did, I'd order Vocabulary from Classical Roots: Strategic Vocabulary Instruction through Greek and Latin Roots by Norma Fifer, Nancy Flowers. Actually....as I think about it, I may just go ahead and order the first book and assume that "word study" is a good thing for its own sake. I hesitate only because a year ago I spent some time working with the first book and found that it's not as user-friendly as a self-teaching book should be. Too many new words are introduced too quickly, which means that you're constantly having to provide your own practice & self-testing - something I didn't feel like doing and something Christopher won't do.

Christian likes word roots, so when he started working for us two years ago I gave him my copy. But I think I'll go ahead and order a new copy and see whether there's some way I can make it work for Christopher.

In the meantime, we're chipping away at English from the Roots Up at the dinner table. We've learned 13 Greek and Latin words so far. Plus ace boon coon from the New York slang dictionary and three sheets to the wind from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.

Ed had never heard the expression before.



in a nutshell

• A well-educated 12th grader knows 60,000 to 100,000 words.

• This works out to 15 new words learned a day from ages 2 to 17.

• By the middle grades, most of these words must be learned from written materials.

• On average, students need 12 encounters with a word in 12 different contexts to learn it well enough to improve reading comprehension.
  

• UPDATE: Engelmann says the correct figures are in the neighborhood of 30,000 words & 3 new words a day.

Mark, Doug, & Ken on Dungeons & Dragons vocabulary & SRA DI curriculum

here (scroll down)




This is sad news (scroll down):

Steven Alan Stahl, 52, died May 6 at Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana. Stahl, a UI professor of curriculum and instruction, joined the faculty in 2002. Memorials: Steven A. Stahl Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the International Reading Association, the American Cancer Society or the Entertainment Industry Foundation's National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance.

Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading a day?
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
Vocabulary Workshop levels & grades
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006

---

ReadingScores2006 02 Sep 2006 - 13:30 CatherineJohnson




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Christian is so proud of his reading score on the Accuplacer test. It's good to see.

He should be proud. He went through Yonkers schools, graduated with an IEP diploma - the diploma Jimmy and presumably Andrew will earn - and he's reading at college level. That puts him ahead of half the kids taking the ACT this year:

Despite the increases, the results suggest that the majority of ACT-tested graduates are still likely to struggle in first-year college math and science courses.

• 42 percent of test-takers met or exceeded the College Readiness Benchmark on the ACT Math Test (a score of 22), indicating they have a high probability of earning a "C" or higher and a 50/50 chance of earning a "B" or higher in college algebra.

• Only 27 percent met or exceeded the benchmark on the ACT Science Test (a score of 24), indicating they are ready to succeed in college biology.

• Just over half (53%) met or exceeded the benchmark on the ACT Reading Test (a score of 21), indicating they are ready to succeed in first-year college social science courses.

• Nearly seven in ten (69%) met or exceeded the benchmark on the ACT English Test (a score of 18), indicating they are ready to succeed in college composition.

• Only two in ten (21%) met or exceeded the College Readiness Benchmark scores on all four ACT exams, unchanged from last year.
  

2006 ACT National Score Report News Release
August 16, 2006

Our meeting with the special ed attorney was an eye-opener.

More on that later.

(Preview: it's always worse than you think.)

In the meantime, you might want to read Gerry Garibaldi's article on boys and school in City Journal (Ben Calvin linked to this a little while back I think):

The notion of male ethical inferiority first arises in grammar school, where women make up the overwhelming majority of teachers. It’s here that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related disorders in this world, females diagnosed with learning disabilities simply don’t exist.

For a generation now, many well-meaning parents, worn down by their boy’s failure to flourish in school, his poor self-esteem and unhappiness, his discipline problems, decide to accept administration recommendations to have him tested for disabilities. The pitch sounds reasonable: admission into special ed qualifies him for tutoring, modified lessons, extra time on tests (including the SAT), and other supposed benefits. It’s all a hustle, Mom and Dad privately advise their boy. Don’t worry about it. We know there’s nothing wrong with you.

To get into special ed, however, administrators must find something wrong. In my four years of teaching, I’ve never seen them fail. In the first IEP (Individualized Educational Program) meeting, the boy and his parents learn the results of disability testing. When the boy hears from three smiling adults that he does indeed have a learning disability, his young face quivers like Jell-O. For him, it was never a hustle. From then on, however, his expectations of himself—and those of his teachers—plummet.

Special ed is the great spangled elephant in the education parade. Each year, it grows larger and more lumbering, drawing more and more boys into the procession. Since the publication of Sommers’s book, it has grown tenfold. Special ed now is the single largest budget item, outside of basic operations, in most school districts across the country.

Special-ed boosters like to point to the success that boys enjoy after they begin the program. Their grades rise, and the phone calls home cease. Anxious parents feel reassured that progress is happening. In truth, I have rarely seen any real improvement in a student’s performance after he’s become a special-ed kid.

How the Schools Shortchange Boys
christianlearnsmath

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Sep 2006

---

BattleLines 26 Sep 2006 - 19:57 CatherineJohnson




Midway through today's TIMES report on the state's fourth grade slump:

E. D. Hirsch Jr., the author of a recent book, “The Knowledge Deficit,” said students do not learn enough vocabulary and content knowledge at younger ages.

Daniel P. Keating, director of the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan, said schools should prepare students earlier for the more abstract and sophisticated reasoning required in middle school.

“Perhaps the early preparation is not anticipating that shift to having those higher demands,” he said, adding that tests for younger children do not measure those skills. “All of a sudden we’re looking for the kinds of skills that just haven’t been assessed earlier.”

Note: one of these men is a developmental psychologist "whose research focuses on integrating knowledge about biodevelopmental processes, population patterns in developmental health, and social factors affecting individual and population development."

The other is a college professor who has spent a lifetime researching education, creating a superb core curriculum for K-6 students, and researching and writing new content in his own field of research.

The psychologist doesn't know anything about education or curriculum and is giving his best guess.

The curriculum specialist is stating the consensus view of cognitive scientists who've been researching this subject and publishing their results in refereed journals for many years.

Guess which man is winning the argument.


Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines



-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Sep 2006

---

EmailToTheGuidanceCounselor 27 Sep 2006 - 16:23 CatherineJohnson




Hi Griffin —

I’m wondering when we’ll see our kids’ ELA scores.

They’ve been reported in the papers & the school board has heard a report — are we parents going to see our kids’ scores sometime soon?

Thanks!

Catherine J.



Mrs. Johnson,
As of yet, we have not received the ELA scores. I just checked with Mr. Witazek and he said as soon as we receive the scores we will send them out shortly thereafter. If you need anything else, please let me know.
Griffin Murray




That really takes the cake.

I've grown incredibly tired of higher-ups.

Governments; bureaucracies; pundits; wonks. The lot of them. (I don't mean it about the wonks. Where would we be without wonks?)

I want:

• an online norm-referenced standardized test with cross-comparisons to all counties in my state, all states in my country, and all countries on my planet that I can choose or choose not to give to my child each year to ascertain whether he is or is not making one year's progress in one year's time, and which indicates clearly to me whether his year of progress is equivalent to a year of progress elsewhere

• immediate online scoring of said test

• immediate provision of any and all cross-comparisons I may choose to make

• quality assurance that test items have been carefully constructed & field-tested

• a set of cross-correlational statistics showing how this test relates to the classics such as the ITBS (or - here's a thought - the online test could actually be an ITBS)

• a set of cross-correlational statistics showing how scores on this test predict or do not predict future scores on the SAT, ACT, etc.

• BONUS: a set of guidelines as to what a student with my child's scores should be studying now

In short, I would like my child's test scores to be used first and foremost by me and my child.

Not by the state.

Not by the district.

Not by the school board.

Children first.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Sep 2006

---

OurBestStudents 04 Dec 2006 - 00:20 CatherineJohnson







Over a year ago I began wondering whether the universal belief that we have good schools for affluent kids and lousy schools for disadvantaged kids was actually true. One of Jenny D's posts had got me thinking:

...schools serve rich white kids well. They do. Best example is TIMMS data. The highest scoring kids in the U.S. score as well as the highest scoring kids anywhere in the world. [ed.: see below] Our best and brightest are as good as the best and brightest anywhere. We are indeed producing scholars. They tend to be white and affluent, according to the statistics. They go to public and private schools.

[ed.: This is an exaggeration. The only U.S. students who score on par with the rest of the world's math students are those who take AP Calculus, which is 5% of the population.]

I no longer believe this for a number of reasons, the most significant being the fact that SAT verbal scores declined in the 1970s and never recovered. Once I learned that verbal scores are the center of the universe, that settled it.




Ticket to Nowhere
by Paul E. Peterson


Tuesday night's school board meeting raised a version of the rich school/poor school question, namely: how do our middle school students compare to middle-school students in other countries?

Does France have a middle-school slump?

I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

Do our kids, rich and poor, have a middle grades slump because it's natural to have a middle school slump?

Or do they have a middle school slump because our middle schools are inferior to middle schools elsewhere?

Middle school performance has lagged so consistently -- in wealthy suburbs and poor cities, in New York and around the nation -- that many educators, policy experts and even parents just shrug. The middle grades have long been viewed as the Bermuda Triangle of education. A common explanation is that there is simply no cure for puberty.

4th-Grade Successes to 8th-Grade Disappointments: Tests' Meaning Questioned ($)
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: May 26, 2005

Certainly this familiar chart implies that if 11 to 13-year olds in other countries do stumble in the middle grades, they don't come to a full stop the way our kids seem to:

source:
The Seeds of Growth
by Eric Hanushek

at the school board meeting

At the Board meeting we learned that:

• Irvington 4th graders (in 2005-2006) ranked 4th in the state, out of 40, on the ELA

• Irvington 8th graders (in 2005-2006) ranked 14th in the state, out of 40

• 43% of Irvington fourth graders in 2001-2002 scored a 4; 42% scored a 3, 13% scored a 2%; 1% scored 1
  UPDATE: in fact, this figure — the figure for school year 2001-02 — was not presented to us at the Board meeting.
  I had to look it up.

• 16.7% of the 8th graders in 2005-2006 scored a 4; 61.1% scored a 3; 22.2% scored 2s & 1s

Those last two figures are for the same class of kids. 43% get 4s when they're in 4th grade; 4 years later, in 8th, we're down to 16.7% scoring 4.

This was easily explained away by our Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Ralph Napolitano:

• a couple of ELA teachers took sudden leaves, so lots of last year's 8th graders were taught by substitutes

• 18 new students moved into the district, 14 of whom were "receiving services" (mostly 504C or "building support"), and dragged our scores down (total class size: approximately150)

• you really can't compare one year's kids to any other year's kids anyway because "the scaling might be different" (not a direct quote, unfortunately, but close)

There were no dissenters from this view (from all 3 of these views, I should say), although a couple of board members did ask questions which, if the point had been pressed, could have been probing. No probing occurred, however.

Under questioning, Ralph's presentation of self was masterful. When a Board member asked whether other districts include high-end special needs kids in their stats he lowered his voice a bit, assumed an intimate and confiding tone that cast a spell on the room, and said, "Well, you know, I think these days [meaningful look] they'd probably be in some serious trouble if they didn't include their special needs students in their data. But they didn't always..." and he trailed off.

The effect of this was to divert the room from a possible consideration of whether 14 kids receiving services can cause a 50% decline in 4s^* to a general recognition of the virtue displayed by our Irvington administrators, who can be counted upon to tell the truth when other lesser school districts are fudging their numbers. Or used to fudge their numbers, as the case may be.

The question of how many 504C students moved into districts that didn't experience a 50% decline didn't come up.

We moved on.

All of the Board members had read newspaper accounts of the middle school slump. That fact alone earns the framers of NCLB my eternal gratitude. Until this moment, neither journalists nor parents nor parent school board members had any idea that U.S. kids experience a steady decline in scores after 4th or 5th grade. Journalists, if not parents, knew that 8th graders score worse than 4th graders, but they'd never looked at scores showing a steady year-by-year drop. Seeing it that way makes it seem worse, somehow, more inexorable and "systemic":

Meanwhile I am struck by one thing—the (unintended?) result of the federal mandate under No Child Left Behind to test students in every grade, three through eight.

The decline in performance as students age just leaps off the page. No matter whether the school is in a wealthy suburban community or an urban neighborhood full of transients and immigrants, the trend is the same. The only difference is how drastic the drop.

Ever since the state began standardized testing, districts have been struggling to come up with ways to stop the decline in performance from fourth grade to eighth grade. Heck, everyone’s struggled to figure out WHY there’s a decline.

One year, Education Commissioner Richard Mills played the blame game, urging parents to rise up against the middle schools which were clearly failing to do their jobs adequately. He has stopped being so pointed. But he still rails against the decline.

“The problem is literacy in the middle grades,” Mills said in a press release this morning. “These results demand improvement in curriculum, instruction, and professional development.”

So how come sixth, seventh and eighth-graders are struggling with literacy in middle school, yet the region’s high schoolers manage to pass the English Regents exam in much higher proportions? Take a look at any district’s Regent results in our interactive database.

Is there that much remediation going on in high school? Are the tests the problem? Are the kids just refusing to work hard in middle school?

Inquiring minds want to know.

This passage comes to us from "the education team at The Journal News," which has started a new education blog.

The reason the steady decline in scores leaps off the page, btw, is that the state Department of Education put out press releases saying so.

So we turned to the question of a middle school slump in Irvington.

It seems to be the consensus view of the administration and the Board (the Board president, at least) that there isn't one. Irvington students do fine until 8th grade, when they experience a sudden drop.

I wasn't following the presentation as closely as I could have by then; Ralph may have cited consistently high TONYSS scores in Grades 5, 6, & 7 over the years, although I didn't hear him if he did.

The TONYSS situation is a big mess anyway as far as I'm concerned. The TONYSS (Test of New York State Standards) is a privately created and marketed test NY schools used to administer in off-years (grades 5, 6, & 7). We parents were never given any comparison data whatsoever; the scales weren't explained; no sample questions were available, etc. The TONYSS are a complete mystery to me and everyone I know.

So even if he did cite off-year TONYSS scores, it wouldn't have cleared anything up for me.

The 8th grade test, Ralph said, was for some reason "more difficult" than any of the other tests & thus tells us nothing of value about our schools or our kids. We know this because, as he said, "Look at the Regents [exit] scores. They're very high. Everyone goes down in 8th grade. In 11th grade they're back." That last is a direct quote. “In 11th grade they’re back.”

"I can attest to that," the board president said, breaking in. His kids' scores had gone down in the 8th grade and then bounced back in the 11th. It is a universal phenomenon; it happens to everyone.

"The 8th grade test is unnecessarily difficult," Ralph agreed.

And that was that.

When the audience was finally allowed to ask questions one parent said, "Shouldn't the state be looking at itself? Shouldn't the state be asking itself why it's giving kids a test this difficult that isn't in line with the other tests?"

Ralph was mild and forebearing. He had nothing bad to say about the state, or the tests, or the 504C kids who moved into the district and depressed our scores. It was left to the audience to work up a case of indignation against the state and its outlier test. Which I suppose we did.



the bounce

Ralph being the fellow who told the PTSA president that "parents" were complaining about my Singapore math class as he closed it down, I think I'll just go ahead and say that a great deal of his presentation strikes me as nonsense on stilts.

Especially the bit about the bouncing scores.

Scores do not bounce.

Reading scores in particular do not bounce.

The Regents' test, which determines whether a student does or does not earn a diploma, is not comparable to the 8th grade test, which prior to NCLB determined nothing.

It is extremely difficult politically to impose tough exit exams, as Ed learned when he worked on exit exams in history/social studies in CA. When large numbers of 17 year olds are denied a high school diploma because they failed an exit exam, there’s an uproar.

When large numbers of 13 year olds hose the 8th grade test there isn't.

That's the difference.

Here is Chester Finn on cut scores in exit exams:

As if the official passing score of 55 on the state's Regents exams were not low enough, the Buffalo News reported this week that students needed to answer just 33 percent of the questions correctly to achieve that score on the Regents exam in biology, and 45 percent of the questions in math.

[snip]

Should a state be ashamed of setting a passing score this low? Not necessarily, so long as the assessment is good and the "cut score" isn't going to remain low forever. Developing a tough test but setting the initial passing bar low can be a shrewd reform strategy, provided the bar is then continually raised. A state that has high expectations for students spelled out in rigorous academic standards--and solid tests aligned with these standards--has taken important steps toward standards-based reform. Yet--regrettably but realistically--many of today's students are not prepared to meet high standards. This leaves states with three tough options: 1) flunk lots of students, 2) offer easy tests that most students can pass, or 3) offer challenging tests but set cut scores low at the outset, then ratchet them up. Option three may be the most likely to lead to improved instruction. New York claims that next year the cut score goes up to 65. Some doubt that this will actually happen. Watch this space.

source: Gadfly 2001

That was 5 years ago, and the cut scores have not moved:

When the New York State Board of Regents voted last week to delay holding all students to higher standards for at least two more years, they portrayed it as a simple ''mid-course correction'' that was to be expected.

[snip]

An independent panel examining the state's Math A exam in June, which 63 percent of the students failed, concluded that the test itself was badly flawed. They said that if the state uses ''make or break'' tests, then it must spend the money to get them right. In the same vein, the panel found that Albany officials had raised standards but never made the curriculum clear or invested enough in training teachers.

[snip]

On the surface, the idea of guaranteeing that all students receive the same high-quality education is attractive.

Many states have embraced the standards-based approach that New York is using, which calls for statewide learning goals and statewide testing.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, gave further momentum to the movement, with annual testing and penalties and remedies for schools and children that failed to meet standards.

But as much of the country is carried along by this movement, there are growing concerns that the pendulum has swung too far.

Robert L. Linn, a University of Colorado professor and co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, who has served as an adviser to New York's Department of Education, expressed some of the mixed reactions to the standards approach when he said: ''Nobody can argue against No Child Left Behind, because how can you say that you should leave some children behind? But it is also nuts to say that it is possible to bring everybody to the same level. You can say that your goal is to have everyone run a mile in under five minutes, but do you really believe that it can be accomplished? I don't.'' [ed.: please. Running a mile in under five minutes ≠ passing algebra 1]

[snip]

New York used to issue different diplomas for students at different levels. Only the top students, who took the toughest Regents exams, got the prestigious Regents diploma. It was not until 1996 that the Regents made the exams a condition of high school graduation for everyone.

Scaling Back Changes On Regents Standards ($) By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: October 14, 2003

Apparently it's possible to earn scores of 1 to 4 on the Regents exams these days, just as students do on the annual tests, though you'd never know it drilling down into the DOE website.

Irvington students earn a heck of a lot of 4s on Regents English:

• Regents ELA 2003: 79% of Irvington test-takers earned a 4

• Regents ELA 2004: 66% earned a 4

• Regents ELA 2005: 71% earned a 4

• Regents ELA 2006: 70% earned a 4
  

How did our lower grades do last year on the annual NCLB tests?

• Grade 3 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 18.4%

• Grade 4 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 32.3%

• Grade 5 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 26.3%

• Grade 6 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 38.8%

• Grade 7 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 29.7%

• Grade 8 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 16.7%

That's some bounce.

Ralph assured us that we could count on all of our students continuing to do very, very well on Regents ELA.

I wonder why that is.




does everybody bounce?

Not necessarily.

Assuming I’m reading the charts right, in 2 of the last 3 years Hastings-on-Hudson (pdf file), 2 towns over from us, saw its 8th grade scores go up from what they'd been in 4th grade.

Back in 4th grade, both of those classes had lower scores than Irvington children. In 8th grade their scores were higher — on the same “unnecessarily difficult” test our assistant superintendent seems to feel is too much for Irvington children to manage.

Hastings didn't come up at the meeting.




RAND on middle school

So I was Googling up a storm today, trying to find a direct comparison of the Regents' exams, on which our students do so well, to the annual NCLB exams, on which they do much less well. I came up empty, but I did find this passage in a famous RAND study of middle schools:

In sum, the international comparisons do not convey a favorable picture of the achievement of U.S. middle school age students. Although many of the other OECD countries may not have the disparity between the haves and have-nots or the same levels of racial or ethnic diversity as the United States, these factors alone cannot account for the standing of U.S. students. That 4th graders perform well on TIMSS but 8th graders do not suggests that economic conditions cannot explain differences in the relative performance levels for these two grades (Suter, 2000). Analyzing TIMSS results, Schmidt, Jakwerth, and McKnight (1998) found that the variability in student achievement levels in the United States is comparable to that in other countries. Furthermore, tabulations presented by Richard Houang (cited in Suter, 2000) showed that, even if all students belonging to ethnic or racial minorities are excluded, white U.S. students still rank in the lowest one-third of all countries at the end of secondary school. Thus, we cannot attribute the low relative rank of U.S students to the performance of specific racial or ethnic groups. However, differences between certain demographic groups should not be ignored; in later sections of this chapter, we therefore attempt to describe such group differences within the United States more fully.

source: Focus on the Wonder Years: Challenges Facing the American Middle School:
Challenges Facing the American Middle School
Jaana Juvonen
Vi-Nhuan Le
Tessa Kaganoff
Catherine Augustine
Louay Constant
p. 32-34

Our public schools do not serve rich white kids well.

In fact, I've begun to wonder whether some of our affluent suburban schools are giving students less "value-added" per year than inner city schools.

CHAPTER 3: Achievement of Advanced Students



-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Sep 2006

---

RegentsMathA2005 29 Sep 2006 - 16:11 CatherineJohnson




letter to the editor of the NY Times: ($)

The School Year Ends, but Not the Debate
Published: June 21, 2005

To the Editor: As a New York City public school math teacher who is experienced in both performance-based assessment and in Regents testing, I want to make a point about your June 17 editorial ''Educational Standards Under Assault.''

The Math A exam, which is the graduation standard, consists of 30 multiple-choice questions and 9 short-answer questions. In January, a student who answered 14 of the multiple-choice questions correctly and left the short-answer sections completely blank would have fulfilled the graduation requirement. Now, in June, only 13 of the 30 multiple-choice answers needed to be answered correctly to pass the exam.

These are the ''rigorous new tests'' to which you refer; this is the ''progress that New York has made.''

What appears to be progress is nothing more than a passing standard that is lowered each time the test is offered. Performance-based assessment does not threaten our education standards; it sets the bar far higher.

Gabriel DeAngelis
Bronx, June 17, 2005

In an of itself, a "cut score" of 13 of 30 isn't a crime (although cut scores should be publicized), as Chester Finn explained in 2001:

Should a state be ashamed of setting a passing score this low? Not necessarily, so long as the assessment is good and the "cut score" isn't going to remain low forever. Developing a tough test but setting the initial passing bar low can be a shrewd reform strategy, provided the bar is then continually raised. A state that has high expectations for students spelled out in rigorous academic standards--and solid tests aligned with these standards--has taken important steps toward standards-based reform. Yet--regrettably but realistically--many of today's students are not prepared to meet high standards. This leaves states with three tough options: 1) flunk lots of students, 2) offer easy tests that most students can pass, or 3) offer challenging tests but set cut scores low at the outset, then ratchet them up. Option three may be the most likely to lead to improved instruction. New York claims that next year the cut score goes up to 65. Some doubt that this will actually happen. Watch this space.

source: Gadfly 2001

It is extremely difficult to raise student achievement by creating a high-stakes exit exam that flunks huge numbers of often disadvantaged students. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. (I've mentioned that Ed learned this in CA. The high-quality history/social studies test he helped create didn't even make it into the schools.)

But of course creating a strong test with low cut scores only works if you keep raising the cut scores.

Apparently we're lowering them instead.

I'd like to know what's going on with Regents ELA.


To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America's Schools
by Chester E. Finn (pdf file)



-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Sep 2006

---

TheSpinDoctors 04 Oct 2006 - 16:10 CatherineJohnson




Well, well, well. What do you know?

The fabulous reading scores that sent Mayor Bloomberg sailing back into office were a one-shot deal.

Something told me that was going to happen.

Last year, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein announced the results of the state and city reading tests in a press conference at a Bronx elementary school, Public School 33. In this ancient building they announced that a great miracle had taken place. While scores rose in every elementary school grade citywide, nowhere did they rise more than in this virtually all-minority school, where nearly every child is so poor that he qualifies for free lunch.

This was an event of significance, taking place as the campaign for Mr. Bloomberg's re-election was heating up. The announcement of the "historic gains" in reading scores was so powerful, that for all intents and purposes, it removed education as an issue that could be pursued by the mayor's Democratic opponents.

P.S. 33's remarkable scores last year became the symbol of the success of the mayor's Children First initiative. The percentage of children reading at grade level in the third grade rose by 13.9%, to 47.9% from 34%; in the fifth grade rose by 30.5%, to 85% from 54.5%, and in the fourth grade rose by an astounding 46.7%, to 83.4% from 36.7%.

It is unlikely that the mayor or Mr. Klein will return to P.S. 33 this year. That is because this school has now become a symbol of the reality of Children First, not really reform but rather a massive, unprecedented public relations effort with no real achievement behind it.

Virtually all the gains of the previous year at P.S. 33 have been wiped out, according to the latest test scores released this past week. While third-grade scores in the school rose by a respectable 4.8%, the results in the fourth and fifth grades were disastrous. Nearly 36% fewer fourth-grade students passed this year than last, while in fifth grade the pass rate plummeted to 41.9% from 85%. So much for miracles.

[snip]

If one examines results from the last testing prior to the establishment of the mayor's Children First program, the exams taken in the spring of 2003, P.S. 33 children performed better than they did this year. In 2003, over all three grades, 50.5% of children were on grade level, a figure that has now declined to 47.1%.

Beginning with the first testing after the institution of the mayor and chancellor's [ constructivist ] program in reading in 2004, scores have increased citywide by 6.4%. Since the current testing program began in 1999, about 25% more children are reading at grade level, most of the increases coming during what we're told was the "old, failed system."

middle school slump strikes again

The short-term improvement is welcome, but prospective employers and institutions of higher learning are not interested in fourth-grade scores.

[snip]

A pattern of improved scores in the elementary grades and declining performance in the middle grades cuts across all schools, public, private, parochial and even charter schools.While the overall results are better in schools where children come from privileged backgrounds, the decline is still evident.The results released last week in New York state gave this well-known trend new emphasis as this was the first time the state administered tests in each of grades three through eight.

The Knowledge Deficit

What is it about American schools that is breeding this culture of decline and failure? I agree with the noted educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr., who points to the removal of content learning from our nation's schools, beginning in the earliest grades. It is one thing to be able to decode simple reading passages, such as those on fourth-grade tests that speak of general things like making friends and playing in the park. By eighth grade, these passages are more complex, requiring contextual knowledge to be fully understood.

New York City public schools, like most in America, have removed structured textbook learning in history, geography, science, music, and art in favor of large "literacy" blocs, where the reading of fiction greatly predominates. Learning is achieved in small groups working on "projects," rather than as a whole class under the direction of a teacher.

[snip]

That is why history will not remember Mayor Bloomberg as the "Education Mayor." Rather he and Chancellor Klein will be recalled as the ultimate public relations spin doctors, trying and ultimately failing to camouflage yet another decade of educational failure.

The Spin Doctors ($)
By ANDREW WOLF
September 29, 2006
New York Sun

Neoprogressive educators believe that reading and writing are skills, or, alternatively, tools.

To the neoprogressive way of thinking, reading tools and writing tools are like a hammer. You can hit anything with a hammer, a nail, a board, your thumb. Take your pick.

The tool theory of reading and writing, which I've always believed, too, turns out to be completely wrong.

Reading is nothing like a hammer.

Decoding, maybe. Decoding letters on the page might be like a hammer.

But reading a book or an article and understanding it is nothing like a hammer.

Ditto for writing.

Professional writers turn out to be "obsessive" readers, and their obsessive reading turns out to be about amassing huge bodies of domain knowledge in the subjects about which they write.^*

I didn't know!

I thought writing was prose style, structure, clarity, and the occasional paradigm tweaking, didn't-see-it-coming analogy.

I was wrong. Good writing is all of those things, but when you look at what professionals writers actually do you see that they spend many waking hours acquiring more content or rehearsing and reworking the old content they already had.

Professional writers are a lot like Cliff Claven.

They know stuff.



Still mulling what this means for writing instruction.

Suffice it to say, however, that tossing subject matter classes like social studies and science overboard to spend many hours drilling disadvantaged children in reading strategies is a very bad idea.

The Knowledge Deficit

Brian Lehrer Show on NYC scores 2005
stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading
stupid mayor trick part 3: the good news
The Spin Doctors reading scores 2006
City's Fourth-grade Test Scores Rise More Than the State Average 2005

National Reading Panel (official website)
The Partnership for Reading
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")
National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)

invention of middle school & EM in Schaumberg
Is middle school bad for kids?
linking hs scores to grade school

fourth grade slump
Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines

^* "Professional Writing Expertise" by Ronald T. Kellogg
in Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Sep 2006

---

MovingToCanada 07 Oct 2006 - 23:34 CatherineJohnson

source:
Clever red-necks ($)
Sep 21st 2006 | VANCOUVER
From The Economist print edition

ANY eastern Canadians do not think much of Alberta's roaring economic success. They love putting down their wealthy western cousins as loutish rednecks who have the dumb luck to be sitting on pools of oil and natural gas. They do not seem to have noticed that the entire Albertan economy—not just the energy sector—is booming, growing faster than that of any other province. Maybe, with this kind of surging growth year after year, something more than a lucky inheritance is involved. It could be that Albertans are actually doing some things right in building their economy.

Many educators acknowledge that over the past 30 years Alberta has quietly built the finest public education system in Canada. The curriculum has been revised, stressing core subjects (English, science, mathematics), school facilities and the training of teachers have been improved, clear achievement goals have been set and a rigorous province-wide testing programme for grades three (aged 7-8), six (10-11), nine (13-14) and twelve (16-17) has been established to ensure they are met.

It is all paying off. Alberta's students regularly outshine those from other Canadian provinces: in 2004 national tests, Alberta's 13- and 16-year-olds ranked first in mathematics and science, and third in writing. And in international tests they rank alongside the best in the world: in the OECD's 2003 PISA study, the province's 15-year-olds scored among the top four of 40 countries in mathematics, reading and science (see table).

Elsewhere in Canada, especially British Columbia and Ontario, dissatisfaction with public-school standards is increasingly driving parents to pack their children off to private schools. Over the past decade, the proportion of students in such schools has risen by 20% in Canada as a whole, and double that in Ontario. But the private system does not have the same appeal in Alberta, where some 80% of parents say they are happy with the public schools.

This is especially true in the province's capital of Edmonton, which is noted for its innovative system stressing choice, accountability and competition. Funding there is based on the number of students in a school. Each school controls its own budget, spending money on its own educational priorities (such as improving aboriginal-student results), while following the provincial curriculum. Students are free to (and 57% do) attend any school in the city, not just in their own neighbourhood. They can seek out schools specialising in the arts, sports, leadership skills, girls-only education, aboriginal culture, Mandarin, and many other alternative programmes—or simply choose the schools with the best academic results. Students in every grade are tested annually and their scores published.

The results are also used to improve teaching. There is currently a citywide push to ensure that all children in Edmonton can read competently by grade three (88% now can). Far from fearing private-school competition, the city's public system has embraced it: it has already absorbed three private religious schools (two Christian, one Hebrew). “In Edmonton,” says Angus McBeath, the city's recently retired schools chief, “the litmus test is that the rich send their kids to the public schools, not the private schools.”

Another litmus test is the extent to which Edmonton's ideas are being studied by educators from elsewhere (mostly the United States, but some also from Ontario and British Columbia) and are now being emulated. Pilot projects on the Edmonton model have already been launched by school boards in Colorado Springs, Oakland and New York City.

All this is not to say that they have all the answers in Alberta. Their rigorous measurement scheme has revealed that schools still need to do a lot better teaching aboriginal and immigrant children and ensuring that more students finish high school. At present, about 30% of students drop out early, compared with 25% for the country as a whole. That, Alberta's educators admit, is an embarrassing statistic. But in the province's red-hot economy, a 17-year-old with a driver's licence can drop out and easily make C$60,000 ($53,300) a year driving a lorry serving an oil-drilling camp. That's tough competition.

Alberta in a nutshell

• over the past 30 years Alberta has quietly built the finest public education system in Canada

• The curriculum has been revised, stressing core subjects (English, science, mathematics)

• in the OECD's 2003 PISA study, the province's 15-year-olds scored among the top four of 40 countries in mathematics, reading and science

• in Alberta, where some 80% of parents say they are happy with the public schools

• noted for its innovative system stressing choice, accountability and competition

• Students are free to (and 57% do) attend any school in the city

• The results are also used to improve teaching

• Edmonton's ideas are being studied by educators from elsewhere
  

I don't get it.

How can Alberta schools be doing so great when they haven't spent a plugged nickel implementing fully integrated character education?

Or peer leadership?

Or wellness?

Do these people even have Wellness Committees?

image:
Bitter Single Guy



-- CatherineJohnson - 03 Oct 2006

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DeathByData 07 Oct 2006 - 21:56 CatherineJohnson




Ed said the other day that here in Irvington we are going to experience death by data.

He was right.

KDerosa predicted as much lo these many months ago. Or perhaps it was Steve H, or Doug Sundseth, or basically anyone who's ever read Kitchen Table Math.


[pause]


Ah.

It was Steve H, Smartest Tractor, and Stephanie O.

hmm.....I'm tilting slightly in the guys-do-stats-ish direction here in vague recollection-land.

oh well

Round up the usual suspects, and keep scrolling.



Let's review.

1. Irvington Union Free School District has a strategic plan.

2. The strategic plan has 5 goals.

3. Data warehousing, differentiated instruction, and portfolio assessment are goal #2.

4. A couple of weeks ago, at the School Board meeting, I got a look at data warehousing in action.


pop quiz

Can a 61% drop in scores of 4 between grades 4 and 8 in a class of 158 children be explained by 18 kids with scores of <4 moving into the district and a roughly similar number of students with indeterminate scores moving out?

Answer: no.



moving right along

So today I receive word via edline that the Irvington Middle School Site Committee plans a Parent Information Night.

To prepare for Parent Information Night the committee has posted a survey at SurveyMonkey.

I had the same first thought about a Site Committee survey that I did about data warehousing —

Oh, good!

We'll learn something!

The administration will find out how what parents want!

Things will improve!

Then I took the survey.






There are 10 questions in all.

1. Would you like to attend an information night about New York State Assessments in the middle school?

2. How interested are you in obtaining information about stress and anxiety strategies for your middle school child?

3. How interested are you in obtaining information about the Grade 6 New York Math Assessment

4. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 7 New York Math Assessment?

5. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 8 New York Math Assessment?

6. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 8 Social Studies State Assessment

7. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 8 Science State Assessment?

8. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 6 ELA State Assessment?

9. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 7 ELA State Assessment?

10. How interested are you in obtaining information about the grade 8 ELA State Assessment?



Nope.

Nothing problematic about the item construction here.



So naturally, after taking the survey myself (you may be able to view my responses here), I felt compelled to sit down and write a memo to the Site Committee explaining why, for Item #2, How interested are you in obtaining information about stress and anxiety strategies for your middle school child? I selected:

Wild horses could not drag me to a Parent Information Night at which I could obtain stress and anxiety strategies for my middle school child.

It's pretty much the same old same old:

I’ve selected “not at all interested” for the question, “How interested are you in obtaining information about stress and anxiety strategies for your middle school child?”

I’ve selected “not at all interested” because, for my family, this is the wrong question.

For us the right question would be something along the lines of, “How interested are you in obtaining information about strategies your school can use to create a supportive, motivating, and productive learning environment for your middle school child?”

etc., etc.

blah, blah

yadda, yadda

You guys could write the rest.

In your sleep.



data mining at Wikipedia
Statistical Data Mining Tutorials
Two Crows Data Mining

dog of helicopter mom

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Oct 2006

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NegativeLearning 02 Nov 2006 - 18:58 CatherineJohnson




Last year I was trying to figure out if it's possible for a teacher, a Phase 4 math teacher to be precise, actually to destroy the knowledge a child already had.

Can you come out of a course knowing less than you knew going in?

Looks like you can.

And here's the cool thing: there's a term for it!

negative learning

I just took the quiz. Thank God I got everything right.

Christopher's going to take it now.

You can take it once a month. I'm assuming they change the quiz once a month - unless they're trying to capture the phenomenon of negative learning in an online quiz, of course.



This is bunk, of course. "Negative learning" in college can not be demonstrated by showing that seniors know less than freshmen. My question still stands. It is interesting, potentially, to see college freshmen knowing more about American history than college seniors. Could this mean that history teaching in K-12 is improving?

From afar, Christopher's social studies courses seem fairly serious and content-rich to me.

I say "from afar" because our school tells parents essentially nothing about what our children will be studying. No course syllabi, no topic matrix, no scope and sequence.

And they're none too forthcoming when asked a direct question, either.

UPDATE 1:21 pm: Ed says it's definitely possible to have "negative learning" in college. These kids are learning (some) American history and civics in high school, but then taking no American history courses in college and thus forgetting what they learned in K-12. Makes sense.


-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Oct 2006

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ProgressReportPart3 29 Oct 2006 - 01:38 CatherineJohnson




Christian came in the other day and said he'd gotten a 95 on his first paper.

Then he got a 98 on his first test, and the professor invited him to attend a screening of a movie on hip hop artists made by his son. (I think it was hip hop artists.) Shortly after that Christian ventured out of his quiet overachiever hiding place and challenged the brainy female student who'd been dominating the class — and the professor sided with him!

Ed said, "He's getting straight As and he's the teacher's pet."

That's good.

Christian needs to spend some time being teacher's pet.

My favorite Christian story — my favorite Christian's mom story, that is — was the time in high school when somehow his entire team of teachers decided to call Christian's mom on the carpet.

Something like that.

She went in for the meeting, sat down alone in whatever room they put her in, and one by one each teacher walked into the room expecting to tell her all the bad things they knew about Christian.

Not all of the teachers came.

As far as I can tell from this distance, they were all supposed to come.

But some of them refused. Christian's English teacher told him, "I have no problems with you. I'm not going."

That's another thing. There are a lot of hero teachers out there. My kids have had some hero teachers, of course; more often they've had terrific teachers in settings where heroism wasn't called for one way or the other, thank heavens.

But lately I'm hearing other people's stories of hero teachers. One of these stories makes me cry just thinking about it.

Anyway, Christian's mom sat down alone in the room and one by one each teacher came in with his list of complaints and sat down facing Christian's mom.

The teacher would start to talk and Christian's mom would cut him off. "What are you doing for my son?" she said.

The teacher would start to talk again and she'd cut him off again. "What are you doing for my son?"

She just kept doing it until the teacher gave up and left. At least, that's what she did in her son's retelling of the tale.

Then she did the same thing all over again with the next teacher.


I'm sure that went nowhere, but it's a great story.




Saxon math placement test

So I gave Christian his Saxon math placement test and the news was grim: if he were a kid he'd be starting in grade 3.

Since he's an adult I ordered Saxon 5/4, the fourth grade book.

Christian went to 4 grade schools in 5 years. That's called "student mobility," and it's death to achievement,^* particularly math achievement. (I think I'm channelling an earlier post.)










I don't know which of these categories Christian was in — either the 2nd or the 3rd.

That's another story. Christian's mom was fighting with the special ed people to get Christian something, a keyboard I think, a reasonable request given that his entire 504C classification was apparently based on bad handwriting, and the special ed person told her to have Medicaid pay for it.

Christian's mom said, "I work, bi***."

That's the difference between Christian's mom and me.

When my school told me to have Medicaid pay for assistive technology, I went for it.^** I spent months shlepping the kids to WIHD for Medicaid-funded assessments. Then two years later Ed spent months trying to clear up the billing problems when Medicaid didn't pay for it after saying they would.

Our district does now pay for assistive tech for Andrew.

As far as Christian can remember, none of these schools ever checked to see what he knew when he came in. They just plopped him into whatever classroom had space, gave him whatever "services" his 504C standing entitled him to, and went about their day.

Anyway, whatever his income category, Christian went to 4 schools in 5 years.

So today he has 3rd grade level math.




my trip to the edu-attorney

I've mentioned that Ed and I saw an education attorney a few weeks back.

We were there on special ed business, but I was eager to ask about the legal status of typical kids.

Do typical kids have any kind of legal entitlement to an education?

Obviously they do; typical kids have a legal right to a free public education.

But do typical kids have any kind of legal entitlement actually to learn the material the teachers are teaching?

That's what I wanted to know.

The answer is no.

I asked the attorney, "How close are we to being able to sue school districts for negligence or malpractice?"

"People can sue doctors," I said, "people can sue lawyers, people can sue accountants.^*** Why can't people sue schools?"

He stared at me blankly.

I stared back.

"What do you mean?" he said finally. "On what grounds would you sue a school district?"

"Well," I said, "say a student goes all the way through school and graduates without knowing how to read. Could a parent sue because the school has passed her child through 13 years of school without teaching him how to read?" I'd read somewhere that this would be the first successful lawsuit brought by a parent against a district. That's why I brought it up.

No.

A parent could not sue on these grounds.

"If he's gotten all the way through school without being able to read," the attorney said, "then he should have been referred to special ed at some point."

I wasn't quick enough on my feet to ask whether a parent could sue a district for failing to refer her child to special ed, but I gather the answer to that question, too, is no.

The reason I gather that the answer is 'no' is that I now know children to whom this has happened.

I asked whether NCLB altered the legal landscape, but didn't quite follow his answer, which was, in essence, that "NCLB is a special ed law."

I'd never heard it put that way, but I suspect he's right.

I'm coming to the conclusion that parents don't understand the first thing about the law.




case law and custom

For some reason, I had been assuming that the reason parents can't sue schools was that there are state laws protecting school districts from legal action. It made sense to me that a coalition of teachers' unions and school districts would have been able to lobby for such legislation and get it passed.

The reality is far worse.

The reality is that parents have been suing schools for many, many years in many, many states, and they have always lost.

The courts have always ruled in favor of the schools.

Never in favor of the children.

Many decades of case law and custom tell us that no school is accountable for an individual child learning anything at all. I'm happy — in fact I'm eager — to revise this characterization if it's wrong. So let me know.

As our attorney put it, the courts have ruled against parents, because the reason a particular child failed to learn "could be something about the child."

I wasn't quick enough on my feet to ask whether a class action lawsuit would get around the "something about the child" issue (could it be something about every child?), but I doubt the answer would have been any better.




parents step in

For a couple of years now I've been getting the message that it's up to me to make sure my child learns the material covered in school.

When I say "getting the message" I mean "getting the message" in a global, big-picture kind of way.

I don't get this message from individual teachers, with a couple of exceptions. No teacher at Dows Lane or Main Street School ever gave me the impression that she wasn't reponsible for her students learning. The middle school, last year, had an official Grade Contract message assigning full responsibility for learning to students, but when we had our "team meeting" it was obvious every teacher there felt personally responsible for students in her class actually learning the material she was teaching.

So...this isn't a "teacher message."

It's a "school message;" an "administration message;" a "district message."

Why has my district shown no interest in formative assessment or teaching to mastery?

Because decades of case law and custom say there's no reason for them to be interested in formative assessment and teaching to mastery.

They are in the inputs business. The inputs business and the compliance business. They must provide teachers, buildings, books, lessons; and they must comply with countless thousands of pages of edu-law. When I was the parent rep on hiring committees, one of the key questions we asked every candidate concerned his or her familiarity with education law.

And that's it. So when schools innovate or "implement" reforms, they provide more teachers, buildings, books, and lessons. Character ed, differentiated instruction, portfolio assessment — whatever it is.

More stuff.

Parents have to understand that it's up to us to make sure our children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. It doesn't just seem that way. It is that way.

Individual teachers take on responsibilities beyond what they have to take on; individual schools may do the same thing.

But if you don't have one of those teachers or schools, assessing your child's learning and remediating gaps is your job.

Saxon into the breach

So last week Christian started Saxon Math 5/4 Homeschool Edition.

MORE COMING






^* Probably the best article on this is Hanna Skandera & Richard Sousa's "Student Mobility and the Achievement Gap" in the Hoover Digest, but the link isn't working at the moment.

^** Christian's mom didn't have Medicaid because she made too much money. We had Medicaid because we got a Medicaid waiver.

^*** Tough to sue a writer, I've noticed. Free speech is a beautiful thing.

christianlearnsmath

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Oct 2006

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NyStart 26 Oct 2006 - 11:40 CatherineJohnson




a wretched development

Welcome to the Grow Parent Website

This is the big, fancy website New York state has cooked up to bring parents into the loop.

Don't get me wrong.

I would like to be brought into the loop.

I would like to have some concept of what my state "standards" are, where they are, and what a score of "4" on the state test means, if anything.

The Grow Parent Website is not going to tell me.



a "description" of the standards

Thank you, New York state.

Thank you for providing parents with a description of the standards.

I was hoping to find a description of the standards.

As opposed to, say, a page listing the actual standards and providing examples of the types of problems a child who had mastered the standards would be able to do.

Activity: Calculate Taxes and Tips

Encourage your child to look for integers, fractions, and decimals in familiar places.

Yeah.

That sounds good.

Integers ahoy, matey!



I wonder how hard it would be to persuade my state representative to introduce legislation mandating the distribution to interested parents of a REAL standardized test, a norm-referenced AND criterion-referenced standardized test that tells you:

• what your child knows

• what your child doesn't know that other kids his age do know

• how your child stacks up against other children his age in the rest of the country and world
  

I'll probably be sorry I asked that question.



Have I mentioned I am now a certified administrator of the ITBS?

Well, I am.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Oct 2006

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EngelmannOnMasteryAndAbilityGrouping 21 Nov 2006 - 17:55 CatherineJohnson




A number of us have been kicking around the question of ability grouping and teaching to mastery in the Comments thread for the on not teaching to mastery post.

Sometime last night it struck me that I'm not understanding the issue, by which I mean I haven't managed to pull all the fragmented data points floating through my mind into a coherent account of how teaching to mastery affects ability grouping.

Gentile and Lalley propose a model in which the "slow-thirds" are taught to mastery, while the faster-two thirds are occupied with enrichment tasks.

You probably won't find many parents of the faster-two thirds willing to take that deal, which I imagine is part of the reason why schools "teach to the middle."

But I think this way of looking at things isn't quite right — even according to Gentile & Lalley's own evidence. Here's Engelemann:

2. The [grouping] steps are levelers of individual differences. Not all students who stand on the fifth stair [in the curriculum] are the same age, learn at precisely the same rate, have equal intelligence, or exhibit the same “style” of learning. However, every student who is firmly on the fifth step is the same with respect to the program sequence. Each has the skill repertoire and knowledge needed to take the next step and reach that step within 30–45 minutes of instruction. Because students could not reach the fifth step without specific skill and knowledge, the stairway structure of a well-designed program serves as a leveler. All students with a particular skill profile are placed on the same stair. Certainly, the program design does not guarantee that all students will progress at exactly the same rate; however, greatest individual differences occur on the very beginning levels. On higher levels, after students have mastered a battery of skills and knowledge, the difference in rate of ascent for appropriately placed students is far less because all students tend to have enough skill to master the new material at around the same rate.

source:
Student-Program Alignment and Teaching to Mastery (pdf file)
by Siegfried Engelmann

"after students have mastered a battery of skills and knowledge, the difference in rate of ascent for appropriately placed students is far less because all students tend to have enough skill to master the new material at around the same rate"


This is a radical concept — radical meaning paradigm-shifting.

What he's saying is this:

Once students have learned a certain amount of material within any given subject matter, the difference in learning speed amongst the fast-thirds, the middle-thirds, and the slow-thirds is much lower than it was back when they were trying to learn brand new material.



I believe this.

First of all, we saw this ourselves with Christopher last spring.

All of a sudden, in math, he was faster. Ed would reteach a concept at home, and he'd get it.

We didn't know quite what to make of it at the time, but clearly he'd hit Engelmann's tipping point. At the end of the course he'd managed to master enough material to be able to pick up new material faster. (I hit this point myself awhile back, using Saxon Math....)

Second, we know that the big difference between "fast learners" and "slow learners" is in learning, and then remembering what you've learned not too long afterwards. A fast learner "picks things up fast," and then holds onto them better.

We know this because Gentile and Lalley cite research showing this, but we also know this from life.

When I was growing up, my dad had a farm hand who was a slow learner. It's possible his IQ would have put him at the high end of what is considered mental retardation.

His "problem," from my folks' perspective, was simply that he was a slow learner.

His problem was not that he forgot to do things he knew how to do.

That would have been unthinkable — and if you search your own experience you'll find the same thing. It's not normal for people at any level of IQ and ability to forget things they know how to do well.

In fact, forgetting-how-to-do-something-you-seemed-to-know-how-to-do-well is a huge issue in autism. There are heartbreaking stories of autistic kids suddenly losing huge amounts of knowledge or know-how they had previously "mastered" to a 90% criterion. I don't think anyone understands how this happens, or what it means. But the fact that teachers and parents are shocked and saddened when it occurs tells you how much we take solid-memory-of-mastered material and skills for granted. Our folk psychology tells us Gentile, Lalley, and Engelmann are correct: people are very different in their ability to learn new material quickly. People are not different in their ability to remember material and skills they've learned very well.

The language we use offers further evidence.

We speak of "fast learners" and "slow learners."

We don't speak of "high forgetters" and "low forgetters."

We don't speak of "high forgetters" and "low forgetters" because they don't exist (apart from "forgetful" people, who, when it comes to learning, can be fast, slow, or in between.)


Third, we all know that it's harder to learn brand new material in a brand new field than to learn brand new material in a field you know something about.

No need to belabor this point.




background knowledge as the leveller of learning differences

What Engelmann is doing is using a student's background knowledge to allow the creation of somewhat-mixed ability groups in which learning rates for new material are roughly the same.

I'm guessing that the reason one can do this is that at some point students have mastered a "map of the world" — at some point students have a very well practiced and mastered structural understanding of the particular field being taught. UPDATE 11-20-2006: I believe the term for this is "schema."

This is not easy to acquire, btw. I say this as a nonfiction writer who frequently has to attempt to acquire such a structure in order to write about a subject I haven't studied.

Once you have built a "map of the field" inside your memory, it's much easier and faster to slot in a new fact, analysis, or skill being taught in class.

This is my guess, at least.




diversity through teaching to mastery

All schools and probably most parents value diversity.

We're not comfortable with the notion of hiving kids off into top-thirds, middle-thirds, and bottom-thirds, and then keeping them there for the 13 years of K-12. At least, I'm not. UPDATE 6:31 pm: This statement is far too broad. I think it works if I say that "we" - we meaning American culture and Americans in the aggregate - have a core egalitarianism that may or may not affect our feelings about tracking & grouping....Also, in my own case, I've seen the down side of tracking, which is a school deciding that a child "is a 3" (direct quote) and then enforcing said child's 3ness.

Unfortunately, differentiated instruction is simply another way of hiving kids off into the standard 3rds while keeping them physically together inside the same classroom (and piling a whopping big workload on the teacher). No effort is made, under a differentiated instruction model, to accelerate the slower thirds. The thirds are assumed to be given to us by God or nature, take your pick; that's just the way things are.

Things could be different.

Every child should be taught to mastery from the get-go, and grouped according to where he or she is in a sequential curriculum.

When kids reach the tipping point at which their learning rate for a subject accelerates, we'll have classrooms filled with different children who possess different intial rates of learning all working together and moving forward at a steady clip.

Diversity through teaching to mastery.




in a nutshell

• The primary difference between learners lies in different speeds of initial learning of novel material in novel fields or content areas.

• Teachers and parents alike have long observed that learners fall into one of 3 groups: the "fast learners," the "slow learners," and everyone in between.

• question: Are truly gifted children, defined as the top 2% or higher of learners, outside these 3 groups? (I don't know.)

• The fastest third of learners, when learning novel material in a novel field, need 3 to 7 trials to master the material (median = 5). The slowest third need 12 to 33 trials (median = 15). In short, he fastest 3rd learn new material in a new field 3 x faster than the slowest third.

• If novel material in novel field is learned to mastery, retention is roughly the same. People differ dramatically in speed of learning novel material in novel fields, not in degree of forgetting well-mastered material.

• All learning requires relearning.^* That's what "distributed practice" is about. Individual learners do not show large differences in speed of relearning material that has been learned to a 75% to 90% standard. Again: the large individual differences amongst learners are found in first-time learning of novel material in a novel field, period.

• from Gentile and Lalley: "Fast learners, who on average requird 5.3 trials at original learning, relearned to criterion in an average of only 1.4 trials. The corresponding data for slow learners was 17.4 trials at original learning and, remarkably, only 2.1 at relearning. The 1:3 ratio (fast:slow) advantage at original learning was reduced to 1:1.5 at relearning. All students, the fastest and slowest, were ready to relearn quickly as a result of having initially learned to a high mastery standard."

• "What mastery to a high standard can do, in summary, is virtually bypass the effects of IQ for specified educational objectives. What is recalled about educational lessons is more dependent on how well the material is mastered than on such traits as rate of learning or general intellectual abilities." (Gentile & Lalley)
  

Differentiated instruction is not the answer.

Given the amount of extra work for the teacher and the amount of time the faster kids will necessarily have to spend supervising their own enrichment activities, it may be the problem.

Differentiated instruction assumes that the speed of learning a student brings with him to school is a given.

That's not right.

We should see a student's speed of learning the same way we (ought to) see all aspects of human biology and psychology: as a point on a spectrum.

Just as our schools should endeavor to move a child to the top of his IQ range, schools should also endeavor to move individual students to the top of their range of learning speed.

We can do this by teaching all students to mastery from day one.

^* Gifted children, who seem to "breathe content in," may be an exception to this rule. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about gifted children to hazard a guess. For everyone else, including the highly intelligent amongst us, learning involves relearning.

on not teaching to mastery - Gentile & Lalley
Engelmann on diversity and teaching to mastery
IQ is a range, not a point



-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Oct 2006

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HowChildrenRead 04 Dec 2006 - 21:20 CatherineJohnson




Now that we have across-the-board decline growth in Christopher's scores in just one year's time, I'm trying to figure out how panicked I need to be about his future.

The "challenge" here in Irvington is that we have a spiral curriculum in math and ELA classes that assign novels two years below grade level. This results in predictable not-great achievement by the end of middle school, at which point we throw the kids into ferocious competition and tracking for accelerated and Honors classes.

Only the children who "belong" in Honors and/or accelerated courses gain admission, and the admissions process is grueling. Students have to write essays; parents have to sign letters saying they know their kids are applying to Honors and giving their OK.

No effort is made to recruit students into the Honors track.

Ever.

The goal is to make cuts. Figure out who doesn't "belong."

I've been hearing that word for many, many years here in Irvington.

belong

Last year an Irvington administrator told me that "Irvington is the most heavily tracked district I've ever seen."

Direct quote.

So that's the dilemma.

We're paying $20,000 a year in property taxes for Darwinian gatekeeping.

Plan A has to be figuring out whether there is or is not a decent Catholic boys' school somewhere in Westchester County. At this point I think even Ed would be on board for packing Christopher off to the Jesuits for the next few years.

(He's come a long way, baby.)

Christian claims there's a good one in White Plains, so I'll look into it.


[pause]


wow

They have a parents Crusader Club at Stepinac High School.

That could be good.


[pause]


whoa

Their graduates are going to good schools. (Click on "Admissions"; then Click on "Graduates.")

So....I guess the next step is to check out tuition.

Good Lord.

$6,650

We could do it.


[pause]


hmmm....

Their SAT scores are "above average."

No further info.

That's a bad sign.



Alright, enough of that.^*

As I was saying, I'm trying to figure out how panicked to be what to do now.

Over the weekend, this seemed to mean cruising reading comprehension websites.....

I don't even know what got me going on that, but there you are.

oh!

I remember.

Elaine McEwan's book Raising Reading Achievement in Middle and High Schools: Five Simple-to-Follow Strategies arrived with depressing news: just having your kids read books doesn't seem to be enough.

I haven't finished reading that chapter, but Elaine said she was depressed by the research on this, so naturally I became depressed, too. Being sick in bed with the flu helped.

Elaine (apparently we're on a first name basis, Elaine & me) thinks students have to be "held accountable" for their reading - i.e. they have to do something, such as writing a summary, to show they not only read a book or two, they understood what they read. And they have to read more complicated books this year than they did last year and the year before.

That made sense, but what's a more complicated book?

How complicated are the books C. is reading now?

And how do I find out?

This question led to lots of cruising of readability websites & white papers.....


[pause]


San Diego Quick Assessment (pdf file)

The San Diego Quick Assessment is a dandy tool, I think.

I gave it to Christopher and discovered that his "reading for pleasure" level is grade 6; his "instructional" level is grade 7. I suspect he's going to come out higher than that on the ITBS, but the San Diego was helpful. The two words Christopher couldn't read both belong to science vocabulary, which I think is probably good:^** "relativity" (grade 6) and "capillary" (grade 7).

If you're going to use it with your own child, use this link.



So I cruised the readability stuff....and got out my book on summarizing and finally committed to reading the whole thing....and in brief, semi-lucid waking moments I was trying to figure out how, exactly, I'm going to make sure Christopher reads progressively more challenging material AND is "held accountable," by me, for his progressively more challenging reading, I came across the following passage:

Studies show that children often select books both above and below their current reading level, and this is a good thing. Children can often understand large sections of books that are "too hard" because of their interest in and knowledge of the topic,2 and "easy" books often provide valuable background in a new genre that encourages subsequent reading and makes it more comprehensible (Carter, 2000). Left on their own, children engage in a "back and forth movement" between easy and hard books, reading both below and above their current reading levels (Fresch, 1995). In addition, children gradually read books that are more challenging, without the use of reading levels (Krashen, 2001a). The back and forth movement is actually a sine wave that gradually moves upward.

Stenner appears to agree. in one Metametrics brochure ("The 3 Rs': Using the Lexile Framework"), it states that "one strategy that works well is to have students read an easier text on the same subject in order to provide some background knowledge and vocabulary" (p. 3). And Stenner, Burdick, Sanford and Burdick (2001) advise that "the Lexile Framework should never be the only factor considered when selecting a book" (p. 49).

source:
The Lexile Framework: The Controversy Continues

This is one of those dilemmas where I don't have time to figure it all out; I'm going to have to rely on Bayesian priors and, furthermore, I am going to have to assume that I have some Bayesian priors worth listening to.

The one Bayesian prior I have to hope is gold in the bank is me: as far as I can tell, I owe my own recentered Verbal 790 not to anything my schools did, but to the fact that I was a bookworm. (Do people even use the term "bookworm" any more? Do bookworms still exist?) I read all the time, from age 5 on. I read whatever I wanted to read, and what I wanted to read was fiction. I read fiction & only fiction up until high school when I started reading the Great Works of authors like A.S. Neill, John Holt, and Eldridge Cleaver.

So....I'm going to do what my mother did.

Keep Christopher well-stocked in the best books I can find, buy him anything he's remotely interested in reading, and hope for the best.



I may also try to bribe the school into giving him an assigned reading list filled with books at his actual reading level.

The difference between Christopher and me is PlayStation and pro wrestling.

If the school told Christopher he had to read X number of books this year, he'd read X number of books.

Unfortunately, the school's reading plan for 7th graders appears to consist of....two books?

Three?

Well, maybe it's four. Maybe they read one book a quarter.

I don't know.

Parents never know!

I think Ed and I are going to figure out a whole new plan....

Meanwhile I continue to feel that Vocabulary Workshop is an excellent work-around for non-bookworm boy-type kids.

Elaine McEwan website

^* The quest for rescue-by-parochial-school has begun early this year.

^** "good" because I suspect that science vocabulary is the least important language Christopher needs at this point and even down the line....and because Christopher has had two quite good science teachers so far in middle school. I think he's getting what he needs there - or getting as much as he can.


-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006

---

ReadingLevel 12 Dec 2006 - 18:27 CatherineJohnson




I found 3 resources for assessing the difficulty of a book or article yesterday:

• Dale-Chall Readability Index (pdf file) (used in conjunction with Dale-Chall Word List (pdf file)
  

• QUEST book list

• Lexile Book Search (use in conjunction with Lexile FAQ) (I think Mark Roulo put me onto Lexile, but have lost the note I remember having made about it...)
  

And here is Hoagie's Gifted Education Page on readability tests.

When it comes to figuring out your child's reading level, I found the San Diego Quick Assessment helpful. I'll let you know how well it jibes with Christopher's ITBS scores.

Scholastic on the San Diego (pdf file)



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006

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IowaTestOfBasicSkills 09 Dec 2006 - 04:33 CatherineJohnson




I have now mentioned ad nauseum the fact that my district no longer gives standardized tests that would provide actionable intelligence to parents or anyone else.

We have no idea what our kids' scores mean.

Nor does the school have any idea what our kids' scores mean. This is the state's fault, not the school's. The new ELA test is a mess — even the score reports are a mess. Some kids got score reports with one score on one side, a different score on the flip side. At this point the school doubts the validity of either the test or the scoring or both. Not sure.

We certainly have no idea what decline growth in our children's scores means. Judging by the conversations I'm having, more than a few students seem to have experienced decline growth last year.

But of course there's no way of knowing, because all data in Irvington goes straight to the Data Warehouse.

It's Top Secret!



I'm serious about this.

Ed and I have requested subscores for gender and race.

The school is not going to give them to us.

At some point they'll have to; it's the law.

At some point the state of New York will give the data to us — or, alternatively, at some point I'll put on my Girl Reporter cap and go out and get the info myself, then spray paint it on the school wall right next to the statistics about wife-beating.

WAIT!

WAIT!

DID I SAY THAT!

DID I SAY SPRAY PAINT?

Surely not.


[pause]


I will not be spray painting state test subscores on the middle school walls.



Anyway, the main reason I want the gender data is that if there is a large gap between boys and girls on the new ELA test, which I suspect there is (lots of writing on the test; writing typically skews test results to girls) I would be inclined to view the results as incorrect.

But since the school has opted to stonewall I will carry on being upset about my son's decline growth in ELA scores, and I will carry on encouraging other parents of boys to be upset about their sons' decline growth in ELA scores, too.

This is why political consultants the world around recognize stonewalling as the brilliant form of damage control it so obviously is!



Of course, I can kind of see why the school might not like me getting my hands on the subscores for race.

Especially when you take a look at our local achievement gap in years gone by.

Irvington is no KIPP.



defensive testing

The point is: I need information.

Where exactly does Christopher stand?

Enter the ITBS, a test favored by E.D. Hirsch.

You can order the ITBS from two places:

• Piedmont

• Bob Jones^*
  

The ITBS is one long test. About 6 hours worth; 13 separate tests.

• vocabulary

• reading comprehension

• spelling

• capitalization

• punctuation

• usage and expression

• math concepts and estimation

• math problem solving and data interpretation

• math computation

• social studies

• science

• maps and diagrams

• reference materials
  

wow

The science test was so hard I couldn't score it (informally score it, I mean — the tests are scored by computer after you return them).

The maps and diagrams test was impossible.

Everything else was doable.

Ultimately I'll have scores on each separate scale that tell me where Christopher ranks in terms of his fellow-students throughout the country.

For the time being, I'm assuming Christopher is fine on reading comprehension. That scale had 46 questions; he missed 6.

So we'll see.



what the middle school is doing right

The one terrific moment vis a vis our school happened when Christopher took the usage and expression test.

He looked at the first couple of questions and said, "Ms. K taught us all this stuff last year." (And she taught it in one semester, too, in his case.)

He missed 3 out of 41

That's teaching.

The schools here have tremendous teaching talent.

What they don't have is a decent curriculum and a focus on academic achievement.



Math was somewhat disheartening.

My take is that Christopher is exactly where Ed keeps saying he is: his procedural skills aren't bad, but his comprehension is poor.

• mathematics problem solving and data interpretation MISSED: 3 out of 35 (91% correct)

• mathematics computation - hmmm... I didn't record my scoring .... he wasn't great on computation (back to KUMON?)

• mathematics concepts and estimation MISSED: 14 out of 52 (73% correct)

I think I'll probably start giving Christopher the ITBS once a year. That's what Jerry Moore at My Short Pencil does.



^* I know this thanks to Nick's Mama.


-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006

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