Decision-Making About Testing Hurts Real Children

I was working today on analyzing our MCAS results from last spring and decided, just for the fun of it, to see how many of our students would have been considered to be "advanced" and "proficient" if the "cut scores" for the 4th and 5th grade tests were chosen in the same way as the cut scores for the 10th grade tests.  ("Cut scores" are the scores which indicate the division between two categories -- for example, between "proficient" and "needs improvement.")  The results were very interesting -- had our scores been calculated in the same manner as the 10th grade scores, 97% of our students, in both 4th and 5th grade, would have been considered "advanced and proficient" on the ELA tests, and 100% of 4th graders and 94% of 5th graders would have been considered "advanced and proficient" on the math tests.  Since that's not how the scores for the grades below 10th grade are calculated, though, our actual percentages, while good, were quite a bit below that.

Meanwhile, I was talking with teachers today who were worried about a particular student, who is stressed and anxious because of his parents' concern about his MCAS scores. We have many of those students, and many parents who are concerned about the scores.  In some cases, worry about these scores and worry about how their child is doing can cause parents to lose sight of many more important qualities that their child has -- perhaps she is creative, a great thinker, kind to others; perhaps he is a good practical problem-solver, skilled in getting along with others, with many passionate interests -- and focus so much on the scores that the child begins to feel that he/she isn't good enough and becomes stressed and anxious about school and about the tests.

This makes me angry.  Where the performance categories on the tests are set is a decision, possibly a political decision, but certainly a decision, by someone, for some purpose.  Perhaps the scores at the lower grades are set on the low end to encourage schools and students to strive for higher performance.  Perhaps they are set on the low end to create the perception that schools are failing.  Perhaps they are set on the low end because the people who set them genuinely believe that they know what 4th or 5th graders should be able to do.  Whatever the purpose, where the scores are set is a decision.  As stated by Lesley Professor William T. Stokes in his article entitled "Inside the MCAS: A Close Reading of the Fourth Grade Language Arts Test for Massachusetts,"

". . . The reader may wonder at the logic of this system.  Why, it might be asked, are the raw score groupings unequal in number?  The fact is that the conversion between raw scores and standard scores was decided by a committee of designers, consultants, and policy makers.  It was decided.  It was not a matter of necessity; there is nothing intrinsic to the test that requires this particular conversion. . .  The reason this matters is that performance levels are reported in all the media in relation to standard scores.  To obtain a score of 240 will place the student at the threshold of the "proficient" level.  Thus, it makes a very great difference whether a raw score of 35 or 40 or 47 gets the student to that threshold. . .  It is not my purpose here to examine the political and institutional processes that governed these decisions, so I'll leave these issues for another discussion.  My concern now is to help parents and teachers understand the relationship between the reported performance of their youngsters and media presentations of disappointing results.  Suffice to say that if the decision had been made to convert a raw score of 35 to a standard score of 240, then more than half of all fourth graders in Massachusetts would have been judged to be "proficient" or "advanced" -- and the public response to the tests would have been very different indeed. . ."

And, as I noted earlier, if the 10th grade cut score levels were applied to the 4th and 5th grade tests, then 97% of our students, in both 4th and 5th grade, would have been considered "advanced and proficient" on the ELA tests, and 100% of 4th graders and 94% of 5th graders would have been considered "advanced and proficient" on the math tests.  For whatever reasons, the decision was made not to do that. 

There may or may not be well-intentioned reasons for that decision in the political or institutional realm.  But the decision hurts real children and families, and that makes me angry.

Thoughts for a New School Year

Welcome back to a new school year!  To me, a new school year, a new beginning, is one of the most exciting times of the year.  I always make my "new year's" resolutions at the beginning of the school year, rather than at the beginning of the calendar year, and have goals and plans for the school year. For children, too, the year marks a new beginning and new opportunities.

Recently, I was reviewing a book that I've very much enjoyed and appreciated -- Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success -- and it reminded me of an NPR article I had clipped last fall  relating to the mental attitude people have about learning and about struggling to learn something new.  The gist of both of them, which I think is very relevant to the beginning of a new school year, is that a student's mental attitude about learning, and his/her attribution of results to effort or to ability, can make a huge difference to his/her success in learning and success in life.

Mindset begins with this scene:

"When I was a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life.  I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems.  So I brought children one at a time to a room in their school, made them comfortable, and then gave them a series of puzzles to solve. . .  I expected differences among children in how they coped with the difficulty, but I saw something I never expected. . .

"Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, "I love a challenge!". . .  What's wrong with them, I wondered.  I always thought you coped with failure or you didn't cope with failure.  I never thought anyone loved failure.  Were these alien children or were they on to something?. . .

"What did they know?  They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort.  And that's what they were doing -- getting smarter.  Not only weren't they discouraged by failure, they didn't even think they were failing.  They thought they were learning. . .

"I, on the other hand, thought human qualities were carved in stone.  You were smart or you weren't.  It was that simple.  If you could arrange successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart.  Struggles, mistakes, perseverance were just not part of this picture. . .

"Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in stone is an old issue.  What these beliefs mean for you is a new one: What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?" [emphasis added]

The article, published on NPR, entitled "Struggle for Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning" by Alix Spiegel (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning), begins with the story of a teacher in Japan who chose the student who was struggling to put his work on the board. The student continued to work until he finally succeeded, without seeming concerned about his struggle.  The article continues:

"In Eastern cultures. . . it's just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process.  Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle."

If you assume that intelligence is fixed and that struggling means you are not very smart, you will tend to give up easily and avoid situations where you will be seen as not smart.  On the other hand, if you believe that intelligence is fluid and you can learn by working hard, you will tend to persist and will be more likely to succeed.  Other researchers have investigated the messages given to children by different kinds of praise, finding that when children are praised for their effort they learn persistence, but when they are praised for being smart they tend to persist less and give up more easily when a task is difficult.  In the article, Spiegel gives another example of a mother talking to her son about his success in a piano competition, explaining his success as a result of his efforts:  "You practiced and practiced with lots of energy," she tells him.  "It got really hard, but you made a great effort. . ."

From everything I've read, it seems that helping students (and ourselves) avoid a fixed mindset and become more willing to struggle and learn would be a big contributor to their (and our) success, so one thing that all of us could do is be aware of our own assumptions and beliefs in this area and work on attributing success to effort and reinforcing kids in the belief that hard work will result in learning and success.

And I think I will reread Mindset in its entirety as I work on my new [school] year's resolutions.  Here's to a great new year for everyone!

What Kids Need Most -- Sharing With Their Parents

In my last post (quite a while ago, to my embarrassment) I talked about the necessity for a good home-school partnership to support children in their learning.  Recently, two events have pushed me to think even more about parent involvement and how important sharing events and activities with their parents is to children's growth and development.

The two events that got me thinking in this direction were Neary Noodle Night, which was in the beginning of February, and our Book Fair, Art Show, & Ice Cream Social in the beginning of March.  Both are wonderful family events that should help to bring parents and children together and give them a good opportunity to share some of the things that are going on at school as well as to socialize with other parents and kids.  Both evenings worked well that way for some families, but not as well for others, and I am doing some thinking about how to help make them work well for everybody.  What happened at both events was that some parents and children spent the evening together, sharing the discussions about the baskets, chatting over dinner, or playing together in the gym at Noodle Night, shopping for books, chatting over ice cream, and looking together at the art on display at the March event, while other parents spent the evening socializing with other adults while their children ran through the halls and played with each other.  Aside from the inevitable behavior problems on the part of some of the unsupervised children, I was concerned that the evening didn't seem to work as intended -- to give parents and children time for sharing a school-related event -- and am thinking about how the evenings could be restructured to work better, to be fun for both kids and adults and to create that kind of sharing.

Along these lines, I bought a book at our Book Fair that I think relates -- The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick.  It's actually the beginning of a series, of which I have now read five, and I think it provides a great picture of parents and kids sharing an activity which at first was regarded rather negatively by the girls ("Oh, Mom!  Do we have to?"), but which over time resulted in great sharing and increased closeness between the girls and their mothers and gave the parents a window into the girls' world that allowed them to further guide them in their development.  (I do recommend the series, by the way -- they are enjoyable reading with some good learning and growth on the part of the main characters.)  I'm wondering if we could make some changes to our family events that would foster that kind of sharing as the primary aspect of the evening. Even if kids say they want to be with their friends, deep down they actually crave sharing with a parent and that means much more to them than an evening spent playing with friends. And, as kids grow older, they need parent involvement and guidance more than ever, even if they say they don't!