Standardized Tests: Symptoms, Not Causes
Let's talk about tests for a bit:
All standardized tests, by design, yield "normal" or bell curve distributions:
You sometimes hear quanty folks say: "God loves the normal distribution." In this case, however, man is creating God in his own image, because the tests are designed to yield this distribution of scores.
In a normal distribution, most students get average scores: that's why the highest point in the curve is in the middle. As we move to the right from the middle, the test scores go up, but fewer and fewer students get those higher scores. Likewise, as we move to the left from the center, fewer students get the lowest scores.
How does this happen? Well, to start, and as testing expert Daniel Koretz has explained, we only test students on what we reasonably expect them to be able to do. We don't test fourth graders on trigonometry because we know most of them can't solve those kind of problems and wouldn't be able to even if we drilled them on it repeatedly. Similarly, we don't test high school juniors on adding one-digit numbers because we know that would be too easy.
Are there fourth graders that know the difference between a sine and a cosine? Are there juniors who can't add 5 and 4? Of course there are, but we know they are far away from the norm; we don't set our standards based on these outliers. Because we like to see
- See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/05/standardized-tests-symptoms-not-causes.html#sthash.KPPj8HD7.dpuf
