Gen: The Catalog, What we call things, and how we teach

[Paula Neale <PLNeale@AOL.COM>]

Group:

The following comments by Deborah Stafford and Karen DeFrank really struck a
chord with me.

>I am bothered by the idea of naming our tools based
on the standardized tests.  I think that the standardized tests should
reflect what we teach, but not make the decisions for us on our
terminology.

>And I wish those test makers would catch up to the rest of the world,
epecially the IOWA test.

Why does anyone need to know which drawer to look up a certain subject in?
Wouldn't it make more sense to discuss how you decide *what* to look up?

Why DO these tests have so much power?

I don't about your state but here in Missouri it seems we live and breathe the
state test.  Having finally figured out for the most part what to do to help
our kids score higher on the old one, we are now getting a new one.  This one
I believe addresses the oft-heard complaint that the old was not relevant to
the kinds of skills students would really need in life. I think I heard on the
news that only two percent of the sophomores who took the pilot scored as
proficient and only about 15 % in elementary reading.  But of course it's got
to be the teachers who are wrong, not the testmakers, right?  I don't really
understand why school districts as a whole are sitting still for the amount of
power and influence those tests now wield over our whole curriculum and in
fact the entire way our schools are run.  Where is the research to show that
training students to take tests successfully will help them succeed in life?
Where is the proof that all these newer and constantly changing regional and
state tests are even valid measures of what they claim to assess.

When I worked with 4th and 5th graders to prepare them for the choosing
appropriate sources strand of the MMAT, I used to wonder if the test-writers
had ever actually been in an elementary school library and looked at an atlas.
And what difference does it make to a 4th grader (or an adult) whether he
looks in an Atlas, an Encyclopedia or an Almanac to find the capital of a
country.  He's going to find it wherever is handy isn't he?  And whatever it
is is probably going to be on a computer for many of them.

Sometimes I felt(old test, don't know about the new one yet) like if I really
tried to teach them to do research, it might make them score lower on the test
than if I didn't.

Paula Neale
Ingels Elementary school
Kansas City, Missouri
plneale@aol.com

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