Dear Chris,
Hey, cousin. Sorry I'm behind on writing, but just read this article--More than 5,000 Mississippi third-graders could be held back this year for low reading scores. Yeah, my buddies and I are freaking out. It's all we could talk about at lunch yesterday; Fat Joey couldn't even get down his entire juice box, he was so upset.
I've been feeling bad for you down in Florida, and we both remember what happened to Cousin Alice in North Carolina. I just didn't figure it was really going to happen here.
You and I-- we've both been enjoying third grade. It's been the best grade so far-- better time for recess (well, at least back in September before they cancelled recess so we could do more test practice) and I love my teacher. She is so awesome and I just want to see her look at me like she's proud. Kind of like my mom-- I swear, I would walk through fire for that woman and her peanut butter sandwiches. And man-- it is so much fun to learn stuff. Third grade is just the bomb.
You remember my plan. I was just going to not learn to read. Just kind of a goof. True, I want to make Miss Chalkthumper proud, and I want to make my mom proud, and I love it when my dad hugs me and says, "Good job," and it's just so much fun to, like, understand stuff! I could understand stuff extra hard, all day, like a boss.
I was just going to not learn to read. Stand up for myself, stick it to the man, not live in little boxes, not actually try to learn that stuff.
But now they tell me we have to learn to read, or at least learn to pass the reading test, or else we can't go on to fourth grade. Well, hell, that just changes everything!! I wasn't going to try to learn to read, but now that my fourth grade promotion depends on it, I will totally take a different approach to school and like try and stuff (which I so wasn't going to before they threatened me).
I'm sorry I ever made fun of you for living in Florida and having to actually try in third grade. And I'm really sorry about Cousin Alice, who my mom says is just not very bright so they just sit her in a room every day and tell her they expect her to stop being dumb, so stop already. No wonder she sits in the corner and won't talk to anybody at family reunions.
But I guess if they threaten me, I have to learn to read whether I feel like it or not. It's funny-- I always thought that mostly what got me to do things in school was just that it was so much fun and making my teacher and my parents proud made me happy; I might even do a special project just for a pack of gummi bears. But I see now that threats and punishment are what reallymake me want to do my best. I just hope the idea doesn't spread through the whole school. Otherwise in fourth grade they'll probably tell us we have to learn calculus or else they'll beat us. man, school just gets harder and harder.
Later--
Your cousin,
Pat
Thank you for writing this from a third graders perspective, Peter. It makes the heartbreak of these stupid policies even more palpable. It also wants me want to "try harder" to overturn all this reform foolishness.
ReplyDeleteYet it does seem to me that being in fourth grade should mean something about the student's level of academic accomplishment.
ReplyDeleteThat may well be true. It does not follow that flunking third graders for poor standardized test results gets us there. In fact, we have plenty of research to indicate that it doesn't. This is like throwing gasoline on a house fire and protesting, "Well, we had to do something!"
DeletePeter,
DeleteEven if standardized tests do a poor job of measuring students preparation for fourth grade, we are left with the problem of how schools should identify students who are not ready for fourth grade what should schools do with these students. Perhaps the "true" measure would indicate more than 5,000 students are not ready, perhaps it would be less than 5,000 students.
Teachers can tell if a student is ready for fourth grade. What is done with those students is another matter entirely and should be tailored to the unique student. Earlier identification and intervention is key. The smaller the classes, the more likely problems will be identified early. Then what is needed is resources for intervention.
DeleteRebecca,
DeleteWhat if teachers in Mississippi "could tell" that more than 5,000 students were not ready for fourth grade? It might even have been the case that the standardized exams largely picked the same students as teachers would. Do we know about the overlap between the two groups of students?
I don't even know what you're talking about. It makes no sense.
DeleteRebecca,
DeleteLet me try again.
The original post is concerned that 5,000 third grade students are being held back due to low reading scores. Presumably some number of students would also be held back (or given some other remediation) because teachers "could tell" they are not ready for fourth grade. I do not know how many students teachers think should be held back or given remediation in Mississippi, nor do I know how many of the 5,000 students who did poorly on the exam would also be judged by teachers to need remediation or to be held back. It seems to me that these questions need to be answered in order to criticize this program.
Just to make it clear, if every student that did poorly on the reading exam would ALSO be judged by teachers to be the students unprepared for the fourth grade, there seems little to criticize about the exam. If every student that did poorly on the reading exam was judged by teachers to be prepared for fourth grade and the students the teachers judged to by unprepared for fourth grade passed the exam, much more work needs to be done trying to figure out why teachers intuitions about reading and standardized exams come up with such different results. Like most things, I suspect that the results of this exam are somewhere in the middle, agreeing with teacher intuition in many cases, disagreeing with teacher intuition in others. Where in the middle is important.
Teachers don't go by "intuition", they go by formative, every day assessments, which can be difficult to do well if there are too many students in the class. That's why I say class sizes need to be small enough for teachers to make sure each student is learning everything they need to, and so problems can be identified early and individual help given. My son didn't get a good start because there were 29 students in his kindergarten class. In third grade he had trouble with spelling and reading. When he read aloud he would use "a" and "the" interchangeably. He would spell "has" and "was" interchangeably. He could recognize the word "community" and tell you what it meant but he couldn't pronounce it. He flunked the reading tests, where he had to do things like choose the correct word to fill in the blank, "attention" or "attentive". The teacher had too many students to figure out his specific problems. Tests don't show everything a child can or can't do or identify specific problems. A friend of mine who was a special ed teacher said that obviously he had no grasp of phonics, but because he would do things like substitute "next" for "then" when reading aloud, he should do much better in fourth grade because the reading was more based on context than phonics. And he did, though he was always an indifferent student. Holding him back because of test scores would not have helped him. He ended up getting a 33 on the ACT reading comprehension, better than his sisters who always got straight A's in everything. That's why I say it depends on the child's unique situation, and I think he would have struggled a lot less and liked school more if his classes had been smaller.
DeleteRebecca,
ReplyDeleteI was using the word intuition in thought the same spirit as your use of the phrase "teachers can tell if a student is ready for fourth grade".
You do see my point that without knowing the degree to which teachers and the test agree on which student needs remediation, it is difficult to condemn the test for marking 5,000 students in the state as needing remediation?
Sigh. smh
DeleteThere's no way you can be a teacher. You seem to have no idea what tests are or what teaching is.
DeleteActually I am proctoring a final as I post.
DeleteI am impressed at how much you know about me from a post or two. Again, I take it that even if the exam in Mississippi picked out EXACTLY THE SAME STUDENTS that teachers would pick out as needing remediation, you would condemn the exam?
It can be pretty easy to draw inferences. Your poor students. I assume you must be post-secondary.
DeleteSigh. First, "can tell" means to know or notice from observation (and since you have observed it you can recount it.) "Intuition" indicates knowledge or apparent knowledge that you don't know how it comes to you. You cannot use these two expressions in the same "spirit", whatever you mean by that. It makes no sense. Obviously linguistics is not your forte. You really shouldn't talk as if you understand things you don't, it makes murk. I'm sure there are things you understand, but language and elementary reading are not among them.
DeleteSecond, did you pay any attention at all to what I said about my son and tests and class size or do you feel that all that is totally irrelevant to the question of validity and reliability of tests and the main idea of the article, which was the question of whether or not having a student repeat a grade on the basis of one standardized test is useful?
Third, I think it would be very interesting to do a study to see if the results of standardized tests coincided with the recommendations of teachers. It would at least give the tests some validity if they did. But as that hasn't been done, there is nothing to demonstrate the validity of the tests. And it doesn't change the fact that earlier identification of and intervention in individual reading problems would be more productive and that, given that reading is comprised of complex processes and children's brains differ in how and when they develop these processes, the best basis for this identification and intervention is individual formative assessments by carbon-based lifeforms that have this expertise.
Rebecca,
DeleteCan tell does not mean to know from observation, but fine. My use of the word intuition has nothing to do with my argument here.
I did not respond to the story of your son because it seemed at best tangential to the discussion here about the 5,000 students in Mississippi targeted for remediation based on an exam. What kind of remediation is, I would think, a different question. Would it be ok to use standardized exams to target students for remediation if it was something other than having a student repeat the grade?
Finally, it seems to me that the reason to argue against using standardized exams to determine which student needs remediation depend on the exam getting it wrong, that is identifying students that do not need remediation as students that need it, and identifying students who do need remediation as not needing it.
I should point out that comparing the test results with the recommendations of teachers would also give the recommendations of teachers some validity as well. That is the virtue of having two, independent, metrics.
That's fine, but the tests aren't going to do the remediation so I guess we have to trust the teachers for something.
DeleteIndeed, it is teachers that must do the remediation.
DeleteAnd if you're teaching a lecture hall full of college students, you don't have any other way of knowing if they're comprehending the material than giving them some kind of test. It's not like I'm against tests per se. As a high school foreign language teacher I certainly gave tests, but I also used other forms of assessment, like how they did answering questions every day. But I think teaching elementary children to read is even less test-dependent.
DeleteSome of my classes are over 250 students, some around 30. The smallest was a half dozen, though that was a graduate course.
DeleteNot sure what this has to do with the ability of standardized exams to identify students that need remediation though.
Two of my three children have had to take standardized exams to determine eligibility for IEPs, and the results seemed consistent with my observations. In your experience, do standardize exams differ that much from your observations?
As a foreign language teacher, I haven't really had to give standardized tests. But my written tests evaluate different skills than the other assessments I use do.
DeleteWouldn't you use a different type of assessment for a grad course than for an intro lecture class of hundreds of students? I'm just saying that there are a lot of different kinds of assessments and different materials and levels lend themselves to different kinds of assessment. There is no standardized test to identify ADD or ADHD. They have to depend on teacher, parent, and student self observation.
DeleteJust as an example. That probably seems tangential. But everything's related in the end. : )
DeleteMy colleges in the foreign languages have suggested that the Defense Language Proficiency Test is a useful nationally normed test. Do you not find it so?
DeleteIndeed I have much for scaffolding in my introductory classes than my graduate classes. Do you have any first hand experience with the exams in Mississippi or the cut scores?
All I know about the Defense Language Proficiency Test is what I just googled. It's used by the military to determine pay grade. It only assesses reading and listening skills, and a test that doesn't also assess speaking and writing skills isn't a complete test. A person can have good reading comprehension but not necessarily write well and may not be able to speak or understand at all. A person could be able understand oral speech but not be able to speak or write or understand what they read. Reading and listening are what we call "passive" skills and speaking and writing are "active" skills, and and passive and active language skills take place in different parts of the brain. And it's been questioned if the Defense test is really a good assessment of proficiency even for what it does test.
DeleteThe AP test is a good test if what you want to know is if a person is near-native in all the four skills, but in order to do well on it you really have to study at least 6 years in courses specifically for this purpose plus spend some time in a country where they speak the language.
When I was in high school we took something called the National French Test every year in my advanced placement French class and we would always all do terrible. It was freaking impossible. I think it was probably not a very good test. My teacher would always complain that other teachers would cheat and open the test beforehand and teach the specific things on the test.
I like the ACTFL guidelines and that's what I try to follow. I don't worry about how my students stack up to other students other places in any way. I just want them to enjoy language, understand how it works, and be able to actually communicate in the language.
All I know about Mississippi is what was in the article, which I thought was very confusing. It said last year on a reading test 5000 students failed. This year they used a different test based on common core (which has been found to be developmentally inappropriate in its standards for the early grades) and they suppose that around 5000 will fail this one also, which would be 15%, but they don;t know because they don't have the results back yet. Meanwhile, on some (other?) year-end test last year only 50% were proficient or above. Wouldn't that mean that 50% failed? Very confusing.
Rebeccca,
ReplyDeleteI understand that it is much easier to insult posters than to actually consider the arguments presented, but you might want to try thinking about the argument. At this point I have boiled it down to a single question: if the exam picked out EXACTLY THE SAME STUDENTS as the teachers picked out for remediation, would you condemn the exam?