Designer of Value-Added Tests a Skeptic about Current Test Mania
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Defenders of our current obsession over test scores claim that new, better tests will rescue us from the educational stagnation caused by a test prep curriculum. And one of those new types of tests is an adaptive test, which adjusts the difficulty of questions as students work, so that students are always challenged. This gives a better measure of student ability than a traditional test, and can be given in the fall and spring to measure student growth over the year. This approach is increasingly being used to determine the "value" individual teachers add to their students' academic ability, which is then used as a significant factor in teacher evaluation -- as required by the Department of Education as a condition for relief from No Child Left Behind.
Defenders of our current obsession over test scores claim that new, better tests will rescue us from the educational stagnation caused by a test prep curriculum. And one of those new types of tests is an adaptive test, which adjusts the difficulty of questions as students work, so that students are always challenged. This gives a better measure of student ability than a traditional test, and can be given in the fall and spring to measure student growth over the year. This approach is increasingly being used to determine the "value" individual teachers add to their students' academic ability, which is then used as a significant factor in teacher evaluation -- as required by the Department of Education as a condition for relief from No Child Left Behind.