Part V: Critical Elements in the Classroom: Assessment and Technology
Chapter 12: Assessment in the Classroom
Chapter 13: Assessing Learning through Standardized Testing
Chapter 14: An In-Depth Guide to Using Technology in the Classroom
Case Study: Diversity in Teacher Beliefs and Attitudes Towards
Standardized Testing, pg 520-521
In this case study, teachers and administrators at Nunaka Valley Elementary in Anchorage, Alaska are struggling to meet the time table of preparing students for Alaska’s standards-based assessments in April. The
characters are:
Mr. Cardasis, fourth grade teacher
Mr. Cardasis’ students: Christopher, Emma, Madison, Tyler, Chloe
Mrs. Iso, testing coordinator
Mrs. Nappaaluk, third grade teacher
Mr. Peratrovich, fifth grade teacher
Ms. Kendall, a first year teacher
Guiding question: Which behaviors are likely to have an impact on the student’s development, learning, motivation, classroom behavior, and/or assessment and why?
The answer to this whopper of a question is all of them. All of our behaviors are likely to impact the student in some way, and the behaviors which will have the greatest impact on each individual student vary according to where individual student deficiencies lie. For example, we can expect students who are in the greatest need experience great leaps in achievement when they are given access to a high-quality diet and safe housing; however, that which are most under the classroom teachers’ control to impact the greatest majority of students are teachers’ lesson plans, teachers’attitudes towards the test, and how teachers’ convey to students the meaning or purpose of the test.
When teachers have a bad attitude about the test, nothing good is going to come out of that. Even if the test is a truly awful instrument, we have very little control over state testing. We have no control over the time table over which tests are administered or the content of the test, except outside of the classroom. I think it is imperative that teachers participate in state planning professionally and political; however, that occurs outside of the classroom and reform efforts often take many years to implement. Teachers should go into each school year accepting the reality of this school year’s testing and plan lessons accordingly and not bring any negative baggage about it into the classroom. I believe a guiding wisdom that is wholly applicable to the state testing process can be found in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace…
The test is supposed to be a standards-based test, so if the test is performing the function for which it was designed, it tests students’mastery of the standards, standards which we are employed for the express purpose of teaching. Each professional needs to personally commit to standards-based teaching or else what are you doing teaching in a public school? There certainly are other ways to approach pedagogy, but that is not what public schools in the United States are doing. I would argue that if that is something with which an individual teacher has a philosophical problem with that pedagogy, then he or she would be best suited teaching somewhere other than a public school. If you don’t believe in the system, then you can’t effectively prepare your students for achieving within the system.
In this case study, I can’t tell how deeply rooted teachers’objections to the test are. In some cases, teachers have problems with the administration of the test, such as a sense of not having enough time to prepare students, but in at least one case, a teacher seems to need to do some soul searching about why he is in the classroom. In every case, the school needs to get with the reality that we have standards-based testing and move on with the business of teaching and learning. In this staff meeting, there is discussion about how to best teach to the test, when what they should be asking is, How should we teach to the standards? Except in the minutia of instructing students how to fill in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, there is almost no preparation students who have mastered the content in the standards should need. The test is designed to measure the content that students are learning in the classroom every day. Preparing for “the test” or “teaching to the test” is a sort of backwards way of expressing this universally-held notion that the test is something wholly separated from what we are doing in the classroom every day. That should not be, and that is the underlying problem at Nunaka Valley Elementary.
I have identified three specific behaviors at Nunaka Valley that do not promote success on the test: obsessing about the test with students and colleagues, negative discussion of the test with students and colleagues, and generally ineffective teaching. To improve the school, staff should focus on improving their teaching of the standards and treat the test as an assessment of what they are doing every single day instead of a separate “event” that occurs once per year.
Guiding question: Are the teachers’ strategies likely to overcome the development, learning, motivation, classroom behavior, and/or assessment challenges identified? Are there any alternative strategies that can be used to overcome the challenges
identified?
Mr. Cardasis, who seems to be the primary focus of this case study, seems to be a poster child for what not to do. He talks negatively about testing to his class, then piles “practice tests” on them over a series of months.
He complains that his students are anxious about the testing, then he creates lesson plans where all they do is “test prep.” He complains that students are missing out on “learning time,” yet he is the person in charge of what they are doing with their time in his classroom, so it seems to me like he is the person responsible for short-changing them. The more boring his classes are, the more disengaged students become.
He says he wants learning to be fun and creative, yet those are not the classes that he is creating. I agree with him that months of practice tests do strip all of the fun and creativity out of learning, so why is he planning his year this way? He states that he is giving all of these practice tests to identify what content students need additional instruction, but it seems that he is spending more time assessing his students than actually doing instruction. He is wasting all of his classroom time.
Mr. Cardasis also has some political problems about the effect that Alaska’s SBAs are affecting the broader curriculum, particularly in content areas not covered by the test, such as the arts. I find myself holding a similar opinion; however, it does not do any good to work against the flow in your management of class time. These are issues that need to be discussed at a higher level, with school administration and school board meetings. If the school district says that grade four will have two hours of math per day and one hour of P.E. per week, that is the schedule you have for the year. An effective strategy is to
accept it, which perhaps Mr. Cardasis has done, and perhaps he has not. When he tells students that tomorrow,
they will do something “fun,” what exactly does that mean? Does it mean they will not study reading, math, or science? If so, that is a problem. His challenge is to make reading, math, and science fun. It is completely spelled out for us by the district curriculum what we are supposed to teach. Everything we do should be aligned to that purpose. Accepting the job for what it is and striving to do your best to achieve school, district, and state goals, that is an effective strategies. Focusing on wishing the goal to be something else, that is not an effective strategy.
It is not clear if these practice tests are originating with Mrs. Iso, the school’s testing coordinator, but it also is not
indicated that Mr. Cardasis has to administer the practice tests. Mr. Cardasis has observed that students are burned out on the practice tests, so continuing to administer them is probably not an effective strategy. Mrs. Iso seems open to other motivational strategies. She possesses an understanding that students can be engaging in cooperative learning or other activities besides individual seatwork and those activities will help them succeed on the test. However, I disagree that students need to be motivated all year long towards the test. Students do need to be motivated to come to school, succeed in their lessons, and have a positive attitude towards learning, and I believe those things will naturally increase their chances of success on the test, whereas obsessing about the test would seem to make them feel more anxious and less motivated. Generally, Mrs. Iso probably needs to work on getting across the message the case study concludes with, that “if we all focus our energy on providing high-quality, research-based instruction, students will learn the skills they need to succeed.”
Mrs. Nappaaluk seems to be using games as an effective strategy for teaching in her classroom. The motivational strategy she is using is to make learning or “schoolwork” fun. She identified sports as a topic which intrinsically motivated her students and used that to motivate them towards learning math.
Mr. Peratrovich feels that he is crunched for time to teach all of the content. He worries that his students are struggling with fractions and that he will not have time to teach statistics and probability. I believe an effective strategy for him to use would be to integrate fractions into his teaching of statistics and probability, since applications of fractions may help students to gain more meaning of what the fractions represent. Mrs. Nappaaluk also feels there is not enough time to cover all of her content. I agree that there is never enough time. There will never, ever be enough time. Mr. Cardasis is frustrated that he will not have two weeks to spend on measurement and geometry. That’s life.
The very same teachers I hear complaining about not having enough time are teachers who I see showing movies in the classroom, having class parties, and engaging in other extracurricular activities. That is how we got these tests in the first place, because the public does not want to be paying good money for students to be going to school wasting time and the public’s money. Being accountable means being accountable for what you are doing with students’ time. Overall, it seems that teachers at Nunaka Valley Elementary should look more carefully at what they are spending time on, cutting out activities that don’t help them achieve their goals, and work at crafting their lesson plans to integrate more content. Measurement should be happening in science class as well as math. Reading and writing are also effectively used for teaching and learning mathematics, as the practice of journaling is being introduced by some elementary teachers for math instruction.
Ms. Kendall shares a concern that the state tests do not effectively measure higher-order learning that requires analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creativity. While I may agree that the test probability does not measure creativity; however, creative thinking requires a mastery of the domain (Moreno 253). Other higher-order processes likewise require a mastery of the domain. If she is implementing her lessons so that students are using higher-order thinking, her students will be even better prepared for the test if the test mostly covers lower-order topics.
The number one thing teachers at this school need to focus on is their teaching. Constant drilling of basic skills will be less effective than engaging students in higher-order tasks, which promote learning by engaging the memory (Moreno 222). Focusing on higher-order skills like analysis and synthesis of content will increase the likelihood of content being accessible in long-term memory. They should continue to strive towards lessons that are perceived as relevant to students for some reason other than “the test.”
Teachers would do well to stop talking obsessively about the test, as this will not increase student motivation. When the test is discussed at all, and this should probably be limited to instruction of knowledge students may need about the test, such as the format in which they will be expected to respond to questions, students should be given reasons why they should want to perform well on the test, such as “This test is a great opportunity to show your parents how much stuff you learned this year.”
characters are:
Mr. Cardasis, fourth grade teacher
Mr. Cardasis’ students: Christopher, Emma, Madison, Tyler, Chloe
Mrs. Iso, testing coordinator
Mrs. Nappaaluk, third grade teacher
Mr. Peratrovich, fifth grade teacher
Ms. Kendall, a first year teacher
Guiding question: Which behaviors are likely to have an impact on the student’s development, learning, motivation, classroom behavior, and/or assessment and why?
The answer to this whopper of a question is all of them. All of our behaviors are likely to impact the student in some way, and the behaviors which will have the greatest impact on each individual student vary according to where individual student deficiencies lie. For example, we can expect students who are in the greatest need experience great leaps in achievement when they are given access to a high-quality diet and safe housing; however, that which are most under the classroom teachers’ control to impact the greatest majority of students are teachers’ lesson plans, teachers’attitudes towards the test, and how teachers’ convey to students the meaning or purpose of the test.
When teachers have a bad attitude about the test, nothing good is going to come out of that. Even if the test is a truly awful instrument, we have very little control over state testing. We have no control over the time table over which tests are administered or the content of the test, except outside of the classroom. I think it is imperative that teachers participate in state planning professionally and political; however, that occurs outside of the classroom and reform efforts often take many years to implement. Teachers should go into each school year accepting the reality of this school year’s testing and plan lessons accordingly and not bring any negative baggage about it into the classroom. I believe a guiding wisdom that is wholly applicable to the state testing process can be found in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace…
The test is supposed to be a standards-based test, so if the test is performing the function for which it was designed, it tests students’mastery of the standards, standards which we are employed for the express purpose of teaching. Each professional needs to personally commit to standards-based teaching or else what are you doing teaching in a public school? There certainly are other ways to approach pedagogy, but that is not what public schools in the United States are doing. I would argue that if that is something with which an individual teacher has a philosophical problem with that pedagogy, then he or she would be best suited teaching somewhere other than a public school. If you don’t believe in the system, then you can’t effectively prepare your students for achieving within the system.
In this case study, I can’t tell how deeply rooted teachers’objections to the test are. In some cases, teachers have problems with the administration of the test, such as a sense of not having enough time to prepare students, but in at least one case, a teacher seems to need to do some soul searching about why he is in the classroom. In every case, the school needs to get with the reality that we have standards-based testing and move on with the business of teaching and learning. In this staff meeting, there is discussion about how to best teach to the test, when what they should be asking is, How should we teach to the standards? Except in the minutia of instructing students how to fill in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, there is almost no preparation students who have mastered the content in the standards should need. The test is designed to measure the content that students are learning in the classroom every day. Preparing for “the test” or “teaching to the test” is a sort of backwards way of expressing this universally-held notion that the test is something wholly separated from what we are doing in the classroom every day. That should not be, and that is the underlying problem at Nunaka Valley Elementary.
I have identified three specific behaviors at Nunaka Valley that do not promote success on the test: obsessing about the test with students and colleagues, negative discussion of the test with students and colleagues, and generally ineffective teaching. To improve the school, staff should focus on improving their teaching of the standards and treat the test as an assessment of what they are doing every single day instead of a separate “event” that occurs once per year.
Guiding question: Are the teachers’ strategies likely to overcome the development, learning, motivation, classroom behavior, and/or assessment challenges identified? Are there any alternative strategies that can be used to overcome the challenges
identified?
Mr. Cardasis, who seems to be the primary focus of this case study, seems to be a poster child for what not to do. He talks negatively about testing to his class, then piles “practice tests” on them over a series of months.
He complains that his students are anxious about the testing, then he creates lesson plans where all they do is “test prep.” He complains that students are missing out on “learning time,” yet he is the person in charge of what they are doing with their time in his classroom, so it seems to me like he is the person responsible for short-changing them. The more boring his classes are, the more disengaged students become.
He says he wants learning to be fun and creative, yet those are not the classes that he is creating. I agree with him that months of practice tests do strip all of the fun and creativity out of learning, so why is he planning his year this way? He states that he is giving all of these practice tests to identify what content students need additional instruction, but it seems that he is spending more time assessing his students than actually doing instruction. He is wasting all of his classroom time.
Mr. Cardasis also has some political problems about the effect that Alaska’s SBAs are affecting the broader curriculum, particularly in content areas not covered by the test, such as the arts. I find myself holding a similar opinion; however, it does not do any good to work against the flow in your management of class time. These are issues that need to be discussed at a higher level, with school administration and school board meetings. If the school district says that grade four will have two hours of math per day and one hour of P.E. per week, that is the schedule you have for the year. An effective strategy is to
accept it, which perhaps Mr. Cardasis has done, and perhaps he has not. When he tells students that tomorrow,
they will do something “fun,” what exactly does that mean? Does it mean they will not study reading, math, or science? If so, that is a problem. His challenge is to make reading, math, and science fun. It is completely spelled out for us by the district curriculum what we are supposed to teach. Everything we do should be aligned to that purpose. Accepting the job for what it is and striving to do your best to achieve school, district, and state goals, that is an effective strategies. Focusing on wishing the goal to be something else, that is not an effective strategy.
It is not clear if these practice tests are originating with Mrs. Iso, the school’s testing coordinator, but it also is not
indicated that Mr. Cardasis has to administer the practice tests. Mr. Cardasis has observed that students are burned out on the practice tests, so continuing to administer them is probably not an effective strategy. Mrs. Iso seems open to other motivational strategies. She possesses an understanding that students can be engaging in cooperative learning or other activities besides individual seatwork and those activities will help them succeed on the test. However, I disagree that students need to be motivated all year long towards the test. Students do need to be motivated to come to school, succeed in their lessons, and have a positive attitude towards learning, and I believe those things will naturally increase their chances of success on the test, whereas obsessing about the test would seem to make them feel more anxious and less motivated. Generally, Mrs. Iso probably needs to work on getting across the message the case study concludes with, that “if we all focus our energy on providing high-quality, research-based instruction, students will learn the skills they need to succeed.”
Mrs. Nappaaluk seems to be using games as an effective strategy for teaching in her classroom. The motivational strategy she is using is to make learning or “schoolwork” fun. She identified sports as a topic which intrinsically motivated her students and used that to motivate them towards learning math.
Mr. Peratrovich feels that he is crunched for time to teach all of the content. He worries that his students are struggling with fractions and that he will not have time to teach statistics and probability. I believe an effective strategy for him to use would be to integrate fractions into his teaching of statistics and probability, since applications of fractions may help students to gain more meaning of what the fractions represent. Mrs. Nappaaluk also feels there is not enough time to cover all of her content. I agree that there is never enough time. There will never, ever be enough time. Mr. Cardasis is frustrated that he will not have two weeks to spend on measurement and geometry. That’s life.
The very same teachers I hear complaining about not having enough time are teachers who I see showing movies in the classroom, having class parties, and engaging in other extracurricular activities. That is how we got these tests in the first place, because the public does not want to be paying good money for students to be going to school wasting time and the public’s money. Being accountable means being accountable for what you are doing with students’ time. Overall, it seems that teachers at Nunaka Valley Elementary should look more carefully at what they are spending time on, cutting out activities that don’t help them achieve their goals, and work at crafting their lesson plans to integrate more content. Measurement should be happening in science class as well as math. Reading and writing are also effectively used for teaching and learning mathematics, as the practice of journaling is being introduced by some elementary teachers for math instruction.
Ms. Kendall shares a concern that the state tests do not effectively measure higher-order learning that requires analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creativity. While I may agree that the test probability does not measure creativity; however, creative thinking requires a mastery of the domain (Moreno 253). Other higher-order processes likewise require a mastery of the domain. If she is implementing her lessons so that students are using higher-order thinking, her students will be even better prepared for the test if the test mostly covers lower-order topics.
The number one thing teachers at this school need to focus on is their teaching. Constant drilling of basic skills will be less effective than engaging students in higher-order tasks, which promote learning by engaging the memory (Moreno 222). Focusing on higher-order skills like analysis and synthesis of content will increase the likelihood of content being accessible in long-term memory. They should continue to strive towards lessons that are perceived as relevant to students for some reason other than “the test.”
Teachers would do well to stop talking obsessively about the test, as this will not increase student motivation. When the test is discussed at all, and this should probably be limited to instruction of knowledge students may need about the test, such as the format in which they will be expected to respond to questions, students should be given reasons why they should want to perform well on the test, such as “This test is a great opportunity to show your parents how much stuff you learned this year.”