As we come to the end of this week, I realize just how little time is left in this semester which means how little time we have to finish our policy papers and presentations. So I guess it is time for the rubber to meet the road (aka let’s get the ball rolling). My team and I have been meeting every Sunday for two hours for the last two months or so. We have conducted several interviews with many educators at the University as well as with some in the State College Area School District. We have made a short outline for our paper and presentation and we have even started the power point for our presentation. We have several ideas for our policy and we are finally getting down to the barebones of what we actually plan to write. So now the hard part: research.
I do not know what it is about research but it is just so hard to start. Yes we have been doing research all along but it seems to be a question of organizing the information we have gathered into something coherent. And then just continuing to research and organize it.
One of the issues with my team’s topic is that it is very broad. We narrowed it down to Assessment Reform in Primary and Secondary Ed. We then narrowed that down to looking at reforming the state standardized testing systems. One of our goals is to make these exams more personal for the students and then making sure that they are not the only form of teacher assessment. When Dr. Furman came and spoke to our class she talked about how the Penn State placement tests will become self- adjusting tests so that they can test the students at the level that they are at instead giving one test to all students. Our current standardized testing culture is that all students in the 8th grade in the state of Pennsylvania, for example, take the same exact test, regardless of their level in that subject area. This leads to certain students doing poorly because they may be tested at a level above where they are currently performing. In order to combat this we will propose that the states move to a self-adjusting testing system like PSU. We envision something like the following. If we test 8th graders in math, each student would start out at the 8th grade level for the first question. If that student gets the question right, they will continue onto a second 8th grade level question and so on and so forth. If they get it wrong, the next question will be slightly easier, say on a 7th grade level.
This method has several benefits. First of all, it allows students to be tested at the level that they should be tested at. If an 8th grader is only tested at the 8th grade level but is not performing at that level, he or she is going to be discouraged while taking the test because he/she will feel like they do not know how to answer the questions.
A second major benefit to this self-adjusting method is that it will require students to take the tests on a computer which could provide instant feedback. One of the major issues with how we currently do standardized testing is that the teachers do not see the results in time to adjust their methods if need be. With this method, teachers would get much quicker feedback which would give them time to adjust to their student’s needs based on the results.
This method does have some disadvantages primarily concerning finances. This sort of testing would require that all schools across the state(s) would have to have enough computers to support this system. This would require a lot of resources that many school districts probably do not have currently.
This is only one small part of our policy (very informally written of course). Now it is time to really start hashing out the rest of it.