http://theline.edublogs.org/2007/12/04/yep-its-high-stakes/

As it’s my first year in mainstream, and I have not received any scores back for our January exam, I am probably in the eye of the hurricane…but I have no doubt that *something* unpleasant is coming down the pike for me. The trick will be taking balancing out useful and pertinent analysis of the exam with limiting the pervasive idea (both administratively and, for me, emotionally) that the exam is the best, or the only, means of assessing student knowledge.

In fairness to our district I have to say that no one I’ve heard of in ELA has been personally hauled in to discuss raising their test scores; however, the SpEd department is receiving intense and direct pressure to do exactly that.

I’ve worked around the multiple choice issue this year by having students study the concepts of test creation and then writing and revising their own multiple choice quizzes once a month, based on our curriculum. I can only make claims from my own limited set of data, but I can see tremendous growth in their ability to determine what is important to know, what a decent distractor is, and what a question actually is testing. And, most importantly, in owning and kneading the knowledge like this, they review and relearn it– even if they didn’t pick it up when it was first presented.

Very cool, Dina….

This is certainly my greatest struggle. While my kids regularly engage in this kind of highly motivated dialogue, they’re also the lowest scoring students on the hallway when it comes to end of grade exams.

In the beginning, I kept plugging on, believing that high quality instruction would translate to top scores on EOG exams. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Then, I kept plugging along, figuring that I didn’t care what the tests said. After all, I’m not preparing kids for tests—I’m preparing them for the world.

The problem is, five years later and I’m still getting fussed at for low scores every year! The pressure is building to change my instruction to be more directly connected to the kinds of thinking necessary to properly answer multiple choice reading questions.

That kind of makes me feel dirty!

Does this pressure ever get to you?
Bill

@Lisa: 7th. I wouldn’t go any younger. I’ve had my problems with the unit, but none of them have been because the kids didn’t hook in (aside from the deadly boring documentary on Shakers I showed today– NEVER AGAIN.)
They like discussing “forbidden” books, they ask great questions, and the first two chapters of Pigs are gory, funny, and where the bulk of the profanity occurs. I’ve read it out loud to the extreme gratification of sighs, screams, shudders, and students talking back to the characters. I wish they could assess *that* on a state exam.

Often, what is thought of as an “invasive” species is one that is taken out of it’s native setting, where other forces such as native predators or climate, maintain the species in a balance with those that co-exist with it. The “invasive” species becomes a problem because the species presence disrupts an ecosystem it had not originally occurred in. An examination of Hawaii will give you many good examples.

Now, biologists will argue about how long a species has to be present in an ecosystem before it is considered “native”, don’t get me wrong!

Dina: You would very much like Sarah Stein’s book Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards and while you are at it, look up all the uses of dandelions!;)