ENG 100NOW YOU SEE IT… CH. 4 rEADING RESPONSE JOURNAL

VOCABULARY

NOTES

  1. Assessment (p. 105-111)
  • “New modes of assessment on the internet – everything from public commenting on products and services to leaderboards – where the consumer of content could also evaluate the content” (106). Don’t we see this in consumer reviews, etc. I think about Lane and how she won’t buy a product without reviewing it first.
  • “If you’re looking for conventional achievement using conventional measures, they by definition you cannot at the same time be measuring by other criteria or measuring other qualities” (106).
  • “At work , you succeed or fail, and sometimes you’ve just fired or laid off, no matter how good you are. In life, there is no grading on the curve or otherwise. We know that success in business does NOT correlate with one’s GPA in college” (107-108).
  • Davidson tried contract grading with peer review. Crowdsourcing provided quality control.
  • Should the students evaluate each other? Statistically we know their writing is better when writing for peers from Ch. 3. “Every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren’t we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess and create standards?” (108-109).
  • Numbers = Brain (109).
  • “ . . . we don’t believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will ‘count on the test’” (109). Sadly, my student just said in class discussion yesterday that this is exactly how they feel and react.
  1. Evaluation of Current Assessments and their Development (p.111-123)
  • The way we grade now was criticized even at its inception. It is considered a way to evaluate “lower-order thinking” (111).
  • It is thought that this kind of grading may have originated in England at Cambridge. In America, this kind of grading began at Yale as a means of classifying students into good, better, and best.
  • “The first school to adopt a system of assigning letter grades was Mount Holyoke in 1897, and from there the practice was adopted in other colleges and universities as well as in secondary schools. A few years later, the American Meat Packers Association thought it was so convenient that they adopted the system for the quality or grades, as they called it, of meats” (112). We really made an analogy between the grading of people’s work to the quality of meat? I find that almost offensive.
  • Grading by humans is fallible because of variability.
  • There was even controversy over the grading of meat, which led to the truth-in-labeling law. Proof that it is not objective.
  • Multiple choice testing introduced uniformity, a buzzword considering the debate about grading. It mirrors the uniformity of the American Assembly Line
  • Multiple Choice Testing – Created in 1914 by Frederick J. Kelley, a professor. He developed this as part of his doctoral dissertation to do two things:

1) Combat variability or subjectivity

2)Make the grading process take less time

  • They were developed to prepare students for the machine age. The argument among educators of the time was as follows:

Multiple ChoiceEssay

-Lower-order thinking-Complex, rational, logical thinking

-Debased-exalted

-Focus on memorization without logic-focus on relationships

-Focus on facts without context-Focus on connections

-Focus on details disconnected from analysis-Focus on structures

-Focus on organization

-Focus on logic

-Timed uniformity-Allows for creativity

-Reward for giving the most correct-Allows for rhetorical flourishes

Answers in a specific time-Allows for examples of individual style

-demands right answers- stresses coherent thinking

-divides knowledge into discrete bits

Of information

-UNIFORMITY AND IMPERSONALITY-INDIVIDUALITY AND IDIOSYNCRASY

-AVOIDS JUDGEMENT-REQUIRES JUDGEMENT

  • Connections – kids made fun of me for writing comments in my book, but isn’t that making connections? Discuss
  • Do kids really want teachers to not form judgements? If so, then why do they always want you to consider their answers when they aren’t quite right? DISCUSS
  • Interestingly enough, Kelly, the maker of the multiple choice test, changed his mind. When he became president of the University of Idaho, he spoke of and implemented a different kind of education, more like the traditional one he changed – “His method emphasized general, critical thinking. ‘College practices have shifted the responsibility from the student to the teacher, the emphasis from learning to teaching, with the result that the development of fundamental strengths of purpose or of lasting habits of study is rare” (116). This is a direct reflection of our current educational system. This is why students in my ENG 100 classes are struggling. DISCUSS AS A CLASS.
  • “If multiple-choice test is the Model T of knowledge assessment, we need to ask, What is the purpose of the Model T in an Internet Age?”
  • She puts the question in italics. Discuss the purpose of this. Is this leading to her thesis?
  • The IQ test was originally designed to “predict school success or failure” (117). Isn’t that what the ACT is supposed to do for college?
  • The creator of the IQ test, himself, asserted that intelligence comes in many forms and cannot be measured wholly by any test (117).
  • 1917 – IQ tests were used by our military to “prove” the mental inferiority of various ethnic groups regardless of their ability to read English or familiarity with the content was NOT a consideration – they also used this as a means to determine if you would become an officer or not and to make statements saying that our intelligence was decreasing because of immigrant mixing. They used the test to be racist. Oddly, they didn’t see the fact that women were doing as well as men on the test as a means to support their equality– That makes me angry!!!(119).
  • Does this go back to what we learned in the EAA Logos Chapter about how statistics can be interpreted differently and used to benefit whoever is using them?
  • The three components that changed our assessment in the machine age – statistical methods of analysis, multiple choice testing, and IQ tests – are still the tools used today.
  • New studies by Timothy Salthouse beginning in 2007 used different means of testing – multiple tests testing the same material in different circumstances (times of day or days themselves), more than once, different modes, etc. “He was able to demonstrate that the within-person deviation in test scores averaged about 50 percent of the between person deviation for a variety of cognitive tasks. . . . ‘Everyone has a range of typical performances, a one-person bell curve’” (122).
  • We have to teach so students understand. That is more important that whether or not they do well on a test. Otherwise, “We may be teaching to contradictory, inconsistent, and inconclusive test of lower-order thinking” (123).
  1. No Child Left Behind (pg. 123-125)
  • “Online kids have to make choices among seemingly infinite possibilities. There’s a mismatch between our national standards of testing and the way students are tested every time they sit by themselves in front of a computer screen” (124).
  • Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig , historians, created H-Bot to make a point. The robot performed at a much higher level on standardized tests than people. It proves the point that we are asking students something that they do not need to do, because another system can do it better – it proves that we need to be teaching things a computer can’t do, which does not included standardized, multiple choice tests.
  • According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, “Such exams have fostered a school-based culture of rote memorization that has little to do with true learning” (125).