Hard Days @ Work March 3, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Opinion.add a comment
I end up doing a lot of different things in my job. This week I organized a vendor fair so schools can make better decisions about spending $10 million in bond funds. We had almost 200 people from schools come to see some of the technology options they will be able to choose to help meet their learning goals. Very cool.
Not so cool was the next morning proctoring our high-stakes state mandated test. First off, the teacher was absent, so instead of assisting, I ended up administering the test myself. I have to say this was probably the most discouraging experience I’ve had in a classroom, maybe ever.
Sixty minutes for a group of low academic students to plan and draft a written composition from a one sentence prompt. For this test, there is no opportunity to teach, help, or deviate in any way from the script. These students started out well, with different approaches to planning out what they wanted to write, then moving on to writing a draft.
All went well for about 15 or 20 minutes when students started saying they were done. Pretty soon they were all done. And they really were. They basically gave up after 30 minutes. Instead of going back and reviewing what they wrote, striving to do something better or more creative, they all stopped. They spent another 30 minutes dying for the clock to run faster. And there really wasn’t anything I could do to help them. Any intervention would potentially invalidate the test.
I came away from the experience angry, angry that the students don’t see themselves as having any reason to try, angry that high-stakes tests do nothing to inform teaching, and angry that I can’t make any difference about the whole thing. I’ve never been a big fan of standardized testing. It does nothing to foster a better learning environment. Today’s experience only reinforced that assumption.
