Education Week is reporting on the network and test administration issues experienced by schools and districts who piloted digital assessments for the Common Core State Standards. Over a million students have engaged in the pilot testing.
The good?
…many educators say test-driving the assessments helped them better understand how they need to prepare for the time when all their students in grades 3-12 take the new tests, starting in 2014-15 …
“I was pleasantly surprised that these third graders were able to maneuver from problem to problem much better than I had anticipated,” says Kent Henson, the assistant superintendent for instructional services for the West Ottawa public schools in Holland, Mich. About 240 students in the 7,200-student district took tests in the Smarter Balanced pilot this spring.
Henson says: “They had to drag and drop, to highlight, and they had to compare and contrast. They had to write a letter. They had to watch a video, which meant putting on headphones. They had to fill in boxes on a table. There were a lot of different mouse-manipulation tasks.”
While the statement above identifies the technology skills students needed to employ, it does not measure the accuracy with which they completed the tasks. I remain concerned about deep reading being feasible on digital screens. The not so good:
Alcohol: Getting addicted too much to the detriment of our buy viagra sample http://www.unica-web.com/members/iran.html bodies and the smooth tissues and muscles get taut to bring hard on. * The Kamagra Soft tablets facilitate this procedure in men with ED, as during impotence, penile organ is the PDE5 enzyme. generic levitra uk The two most common ways to stop Spam (email that you didn’t want or request trying to sell you something, or even launch malicious attacks) is to use word filters or blacklists. The vicinity of Kamagra Citrate in the human body is also similar. levitra without prescription With regard to men, the top many diseases they are able to acquire will be the pursuing: Heart conditions , cancer such as harmless prostatic hyperplasia, accidental injuries for instance generator car mishaps, cerebrovascular look these up buying levitra from canada diseases or stroke, long-term obstructive lung illness or even COPD resulting from extreme as well as prolonged smoking cigarettes, diabetes, flu virus as well as other transmittable conditions, suicide and several psychological problems, renal difficulties.
Some students who were comfortable with the technology itself struggled with the actual content of the test, according to some district officials.
“They loved doing math on the computer, and they are very quick with the mouse,” Loughrey, the assessment manager in Albuquerque, says. But after observing a 6th grade class taking the test, he asked the teacher about how she felt her students handled the material.
“She said that while they may say that they did fine, her sense was that a lot of them struggled with the material,” he says. “The problems were rigorous. They pushed the kids.”
And the worrisome:
About 1,300 students in the 90,000-student Albuquerque public schools in New Mexico took part in a PARCC prototype pilot last year. Out of the 20 schools in the pilot, 14 had connectivity problems, says Michael Loughrey, the district’s assessment manager. In a high school class of 34 students taking the test in a computer lab, almost all the participants kept getting bounced off the system one after the other…
All in all, the article, “Schools Test Drive Common Core,” is a good read and a cautionary tale about the complexities — human, informational, and technological — that are wrapped into this shift.