Testing Education

This week I’ve been studying to take the Miller Analogies Test (MAT) as a required for admission to the Utah State University graduate school. I’ve read the packet they sent me, I’ve taken four of the eight sample tests from the study guide, and in every one I’ve felt like I’m randomly guessing. So far on the practice tests I have gotten scores everywhere from 70% down to 53%, and let me tell you, it’s frustrating!

Here is a example test question so you can see why I’m so frustrated:

Ginsberg: Kerouac :: Hughes: (a. Hurston b. Walker c. Morrison d. Lee)

Okay, so I know these are all last names of people, now I’m supposed to figure out how the relationships work between them to choose the correct answer from the options. There are no context clues to help me out, not even a first name. I’m thinking Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Ambassador Karen Hughes, so I wonder what any of the rest of these people have to do with the running of our government system. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of Kerouac, so I’m left with guessing.

The correct answer is A, but I didn’t know that. Apparently Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes both emerged from the Harlem Renaissance just as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac both emerged from the beat movement. Did you know that? Someone must have because I went to the internet and found all of them on Wikipedia, but I’d never even heard of the Harlem Renaissance or the Beat Movement before now.

This experience makes me wonder, what do these tests honestly prove anyhow? In the 400 questions I’ve practiced on so far, I’ve gotten 231 correct answers, a little better than 57% average. As I read the explanations for the correct answers, I’m finding I missed a few because I had narrowed down to two responses and chosen the incorrect one, but too many others I miss because I have absolutely no idea what they are either asking or what the responses mean.

Now, I’m a college graduate with a degree in Secondary Education, a major in English and a minor in psychology and several graduate classes behind me. I’ve taught school for twenty-seven years, and I’m extremely well-read. I watch documentaries and the educational channels sometimes for fun. If I have to random guess on a test like this, I wonder what happens to others who haven’t had the reading and life experiences that I’ve had when they take these tests.

That leads me to the next step question, when did schools begin to reply so heavily on standardized test scores such as this, and better yet, why? There is no way to study for a test such as this. Standardized testing began to take hold of the school system in the mid-1960s and it’s gone rampant ever since, working its way down from college entrance exams to annual testing through all the grades, including kindergarten. But what do test scores really prove? Does a high test score mean a successful life? Does a failing score mean one didn’t study the right courses? Has American Education gone too far? Do we require too many tests?

I’ll go take my test this week, and according to others I know who have taken it, I will probably do well enough to be admitted to graduate school, but my final question still remains: Who benefits from the test the most—the person who takes it, the registrar who considers it, or the company who makes the students pay to take it?

Facing Your Audience

Sometime in junior high, I decided to be a writer. I wrote poetry and short stories, but I looked forward to the day when I would grow up and write novels. It took me several years to get there. Only eleven years ago I completed my first, the story of my mother’s childhood. My second novel was born three years later from a random idea. It was followed two years ago by a book based on my own teenage years, then last year I completed a historical set in the time of the Aztecs that I had been working on for nearly twelve years.

So, four complete novels reside on my computer hard drive. All have been through my critique group, revised, and prepared for publication. And that’s where the problem lies. Despite the fact that I’ve queried several editors and agents, I’ve not yet sold one of these manuscripts. Like many want-to-be authors, I could just give up and set my dreams aside, but after all these years and the amount of work I’ve already put into them, I don’t want to.

I decided to face my audience. All four of my books are meant to be read by teenagers, and every day I see over one-hundred teens in my Honors English classrooms. Copies in hand, I approached several of my best editors. “Would you be willing to read and critique this for me?” The response has been overwhelmingly positive. At last, the chance for the student to tell the teacher what they need to fix.

With delicious glee, the students were off, taking their task seriously. I’ll admit, I was nervous. Sending my babies off to faceless readers was one thing, but knowing I would see my new editors face-to-face every day for the rest of the school year was frightening. “What if they don’t like it? What if they think I’m a terrible writer? Will I be able to fix anything they don’t understand?”

As manuscripts started to come back to me, I discovered that sending them home with kids was the best thing I could do. The responses have been positive; the comments specific and helpful. As I’ve started revision based on my target reader’s input, I feel my manuscripts will be better than I ever thought they could be.

Writers need feedback to improve their work, and no response is as constructive as that from a real audience. Sure, agents and editors will hone my work to make it the best it can be, but the kids—they are the ones who will really matter when the books finally get published.

In the meantime, I continue to revise, getting each book ready for another round of submissions, and I continue to write on the next novel currently in the middle of chapter five. And maybe someday, I’ll be telling my audiences in the newspaper market I have a brand new novel coming out that they can read.

Buzzwords

Over the thirty-four years I’ve been in the classroom as a teacher, student teacher, substitute, and education major, I’ve watched a parade of buzzwords come, and most of them go. Each of these words was associated with a teaching or discipline strategy that was touted as the perfect solution to every problem the education community was facing at the time. Some are still around, albeit many have changed names throughout the years even though the concepts remain the same (ie. Essential Elements of Education). More have been thrown out or simply allowed to fade away, often with a new program emerging with exactly the opposite philosophy being the newest rage (Assertive Discipline has given way to non-threatening discipline techniques).

Some of the buzzwords across the nation today include No Child Left Behind, best practices, higher-order thinking, and collaboration. Since collaboration is a word I hear often in my own school and district, I found a recent discussion on the international Library Media listserv (LM-NET) to be quite interesting.

It seems that the biggest problem with collaboration comes with defining of the term itself. In some districts nationwide the concept means forming a lock-step way of approaching the teaching, assignments, and testing processes for a given subject matter. In others it means to have cross-curricular planning where history, math, science, and language arts teachers work to formulate lessons that allows subject integration into a single project with common objectives. Some include the library media specialist in the planning stages, as they should. A few members of the discussion said the word collaboration should be discarded altogether because what is really accomplished is mere planning instead. Others labeled the process coordination or cooperation. The general consensus is that collaboration does not exist in any of their schools.

As most of the librarians noted, true collaboration takes time, lots of it, with educators working together toward instruction. Unfortunately, discretionary time during the day is rare and to find time elsewhere means that teachers are either giving up their own time to collaborate or the students are losing valuable instructional time. Toni Buzzeo, author of Collaborating to Meet Literacy Standards (Linworth Publishing, 2006) says “collaboration involves not just team-planning, but team-teaching and team-evaluating of student learning.”

Perhaps, as Mike Eisenberg of the University of Washington suggested, “collaboration may actually be part of a continuum that runs: isolation, coordination, cooperation, then collaboration.” Whatever the final decision becomes regarding collaboration, it is important to note that for the purpose to be valid and the time well-spent, the process should always be driven by meeting student needs, not by educators or administrators who intend to push collaboration because it’s one of the buzzwords of education today.

If you’re interested in reading more about buzzwords in education, I recommend a visit to http://www.illinoisloop.org/buzzwords.html. The chart provides a humorous insight into the terms you might hear from teachers and administrators in your district.