Perhaps. Significantly improving student assessment is the real "moon shot" for the stimulus funds.A new Education Week article highlights the potential impact of these funds:
What now seems to be an intractable choice between richer tasks and reliable data, though, could be mediated by advancements in technology that could improve access, cost, and reliability of performance-based testing, some experts argue....Experts add that the infusion of federal cash could also provide more opportunities to devise tests that will better engage teachers in the cognitive science about how knowledge develops over time.But, while Secretary Duncan has set aside $350 million of his “Race to the Top” fund to improve student assessments, plans for these funds remain vague. The article quotes me and others warning that the investment could be wasted if we invest $350 million without thinking differently about our decades-old assessment practices.
Photo: IBM Type 805 Test Scoring Machine, circa 1938
2 comments:
Popham is an outspoken critic of current IRT-based test design practices, saying that they trade validity for reliability. I'm reading a dissertation now that claims to have found an instructionally resistant latent trait in the TAKS (Texas). There's a lot of conventional wisdom to overcome with that $350M...
Good post. Now can you speak to Kevin Carey about his willful misunderstanding of these issues? A compromise where innovations are spurred would be so easy. Draft regulations to restrict use of primitive assessments in ways they weren't designed to be used so that good teachers are not destroyed by circumstances beyond their control, and who knows what creative energy we could release,
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