Month: October 2010

speaking of testing

More MAP today. Very frustrating as the infrastructure seems to have been rolled out without any performance/scalability testing. Five and six year olds are generally not blessed with a lot of patience and when they are removed from their routine, their classroom, and made to sit in front of unfamiliar equipment which doesn’t work, they’re unhappy. And their teachers and other staff, less so.

Evidently, the purpose-built wireless networking equipment for the 25 or so laptops is insufficient. Response times are abysmal, with some of the units freezing to where some students had to be moved to a different station. Older wired equipment seemed to work fine, so the performance issues were not computational. Did no one roll out this system in a lab and test it? Have no other schools reported these issues? And how much taxpayer money is being spent on this? The loss of instructional time, especially given how early in the school year this comes, and the misuse of staff time as library specialists and teachers are forced to do technical support for this product is more of a waste. How hard would it be to send along the equipment to put this on a wired segment? Probably cheaper too. I think a wireless base station should support 25 clients easily, but again, was this ever tested? The old adage that “if you don’t monitor it, you aren’t managing it” rings true here, more simply expressed as “an unmonitored system isn’t in production.” Maybe too geeky for a discussion of education but it ties in with the notion of assessing performance and responding to what’s learned.

And this will be repeated in January and May. January is awfully soon anyway but consider: November is shortened by the Thanksgiving break, then we return for a 2-3 weeks before winter break, with some kids absent and many of them distracted by the upcoming holidays, then two weeks off for winter break. How much useful instructional time is in there? How much will these kids be expected to learn over that time? And will it all work any better?

high-tech or high-touch

Today was the beginning of MAP testing which is not really testing but since the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress®) is a replacement for the loathed WASL old names die hard.

So picture two dozen kindergarteners/1st graders seated at desks with laptops, mice, and headphones. Some of them had never sat in front of a laptop before. Imagine administering a self-guided assessment with students who had never seen a pencil or paper. Some teething troubles, as not all the stations were operational, missing headphones or a mouse, but easily fixed. Not so easily fixed was the design of the exercises. Given there were headphones, you know that questions and answers were read aloud to each student. Fine, though the language and terminology used by the assessment software is likely to differ from that used by the classroom teacher. Unlike a classroom teacher, a computerized test cannot alter the delivery of questions of answers to match the listener. So the assessment of the material may be skewed by how well the student can comprehend the language of the voice prompts and the written answer choices.

The MAP is intended to dynamically change the questions based on prior answers. So if a student presents strength in a given area, the questions will become increasingly more challenging, to assess their strength. Great idea, really. However, if the wording of the questions themselves is more challenging than the question’s content, how accurate can we expect the results to be?

Given the age of these students, some questions contained manipulable elements: put three apples on the plate, sort the ducks by length, for example. In the apple example, simply clicking on an apple made it appear on the plate. With the ducks, they had to be picked up and dragged into position with the mouse. Did I mention that not all of these children were experienced laptop pilots? In other questions, an equation would have a missing term and the student was to choose from a list. Rather than simply clicking on the desired element, they were expected to drag it into position. Some found the trackpad easier, or perhaps more fun, to use but the proctor/administrator wouldn’t let them: why not?

Most frustrating and possibly what makes the MAP design suspect is that there was no way for a student to indicate they didn’t know or were unfamiliar with a concept. They had to choose an answer to get to the next question. The questions I got indicated some of them understood the concept being assessed but had no way to choose from the bewildering answers. Again, how accurate can the results be?

I suppose some will argue that the fix for inadequate technnology is more technology: perhaps a touchscreen device like the iPad would work better. Color me skeptical. Teaching and assessing progress is a human activity that might be aided with computational power but I favor a high-touch over a high-tech approach. When adaptive technology can find ways to assess students with something other than a one size fits all approach, we might be getting somewhere.

Schools are a mirror of society.

:: a thoughtful public school teacher (that doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?)

confidence and competence

First day working with a class of kindergarteners and 1st graders and I am doing one-on-one assessments of reading sight words, knowledge of numerals, shapes, colors. I am struck by the poise and confidence of some of the students who can write their answers without hesitation, by the ones who misspell a word and catch their error when they read it back to themselves (those silent terminal e’s that lengthen vowel sounds are tricky). At the same time, there are some who grope for their answers with some uncertainty, as if they are unfamiliar. What makes the difference in these examples?

Preparation at home, conscious or otherwise, that demonstrates commitment to their child’s education is part of it. Perhaps some parents think the bulk of their work is done when their child walks in those schoolhouse doors. Sadly, that’s when the work really starts, when the teachers and librarians and other kids expand their exposure to all kinds of new knowledge in a new environment, purpose-built for learning. Teachers can only do so much with 20+ children and can use the support that a dedicated one-on-one parent/child relationship provides.

Children are in school 6 hours or so per day out of the 24. Consider than in those 6 school hours, children will eat lunch, have recess, engage in some other enrichment (music, art, health & fitness). That might leave only 4 hours or less of classroom time. They are capable of learning every minute they’re awake. So what happens in the 18 hours they’re not in school is at least as important as those focused and planned hours. Every child should have a family structure that treats learning as a lifelong activity and knowledge as a tool for understanding the world and one’s place in it. Too often we blame the schools for the failings of the larger society, for it’s inability or unwillingness to value each person within its care. Both society and the schools are ours to make to our requirements.