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April 14, 2005
Do Journalists Ever Take Logic Classes?
Number 2 Pencil points to a post at Eduwonk about the New York Times trying to use a study with very poor sampling to cast doubt on No Child Left Behind, despite the fact that other, better studies have reached the opposite conclusion.
They’re quite right to point this out. Goodness knows I hate it when the media chooses studies to report based on ideology rather than how good the study is. However, there’s also an even more idiotic thing that I found buried in the depths of the article.
In both reading and math, the study determined, test scores have gone up somewhat, as each class of students outdoes its predecessors. But within grades, students have made less academic progress during the school year than they did before No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002, the researchers said.…
[The] Northwest study tracked student performance at a level that others did not, a factor that may help explain why some of its findings appear unorthodox. Rather than relying on test scores at just one point in the year, the Northwest study looked at how students fared in the fall and then again in the spring, in an effort to see how much they had learned during the year.
Average student scores at a certain grade level may be improving, but individual students aren’t learning as much during the year. Uh-hu…
With this approach, Northwest found that test scores on its exams did, in fact, go up from one year to the next under No Child Left Behind, typically by less than a point. The reason successive classes appear to do a little better than those before them may stem from the fact that younger students have grown up during a time of more regular testing than their immediate predecessors, the researchers said, and are therefore higher achievers.
Oh, I see. So the “only” reason the average testing score is going up within a grade level, is because the younger students who have been exposed to more testing are higher achievers, and have the right amount of knowledge going into the grade to meet the standards after they’ve completed the grade. Damn! You people have convinced me! Standardized testing IS totally useless.
Posted by illuminaria at April 14, 2005 04:07 PM
Comments
I think the conclusion we were supposed to make was that, since tests are useless, making higher scores on them represents nothing but an increase in test-taking skills.
What the testing critics like to gloss over, though, is if tests measure nothing except test-taking skills, why aren't all kids making perfect scores on the tests by now? :)
Posted by: Kimberly at April 14, 2005 04:20 PM
Obviously successful students learn to take tests well. Somehow, though, they seem to think that this is some new skill we suddenly had to deal with when we invented standardized testing.
Students have always had to learn the method to get the best grade in their class, whether it was learning how to pick up the points the teacher thinks are interesting, or what kinds of essays the teachers like, or what the best strategy is for studying for tests written by the teacher.
Yes, a good and humorous point. :)
Posted by: Illuminaria at April 14, 2005 04:30 PM