Standard test was Re: [Sca-cooks] Iceland & Scotland - what to get?

[grizly at mindspring.com]

Standardized test are given to wide ranges of students (the population of test takers) in order to determine what level of acheivement is the average, what the standard deviation is, and what test questions lack validity in establishing competance in a given area of knowledge.  the Standarized group is then generalized to broader populations to assess quuality of learning to date and project success in further academic advancement.

Those at the very ends of the bell curve distribution will have an extremly easy time or extremely difficult time with the tests.  for every whiz, there is a struggler, so to speak.  While lots of criticisms are posited for the development and statistical validity and reliability of such tests (two different issues entirely), they remain the workhorses of assessment of our educational system.  At some point, there needs be an empirical measure of the effectiveness of teaching and learning, and no one has developed acceptably superior measures.  They don't tell you how to teach so much as tell what is and isn't being learned . . . assessment tolls and not policy making tools.  Now how they are used by policy makers does not make the tool evil or useless or to be reviled.  A hammer sure drives a good nail, but makes a lousy pancake flipper, for example.

pacem et bonum,

niccolo difrancesco


sca-cooks at ansteorra.org wrote:
> Personally I don't even think the tests should have been created in the firstplace. Think if a old fat blad politician who hasn't even taught a class is telling you how to teach. I think it is highly unfair. And I thought we put all the dumb people in West Virginia? (j/k)

Misha
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