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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

School Tech Connect: On Data, and Fundamentalism

School Tech Connect: On Data, and Fundamentalism:

On Data, and Fundamentalism

I stopped teaching kids English at the end of the of the 2004-2005 school year to become a testing coordinator and media specialist, and then administrator and finally, a computer guy. I'm trying to think of a time in the classroom or after when there was a data point generated from testing that surprised me or highlighted a trend I couldn't guess from working with kids all day long.

I don't recall a single instance of that. Not one.

I do recall that during the furtive, illegal instances when I would actually look at the tests my students were taking, I was appalled at the questions my kids were being asked to answer in order to assess their "reading comprehension." It was like some kind of game, is all I can say. A game that you would definitely have to prep kids for, intensely. There were always two questions on pronoun/antecedent agreement--- I even made a