Assessment

Homework assignment for higher education and high school faculty

/ Bill McCallum / 5 Comments

Here is an exercise I just gave to the mixed higher education/high school teams at the PARCC meeting. Thought it might be fun for everybody:

1. Read the standards, noting domains, clusters that are particularly  high priority for college and career readiness (don’t include individual standards unless you absolutely must).

2. Select the most important domain or cluster at each of the grades 6-8 and themes in high school (or just some of the grades and themes if you don’t have time for all).

3. [Optional] For each one pick one or two practices that are particularly  salient, and explain how it is exemplified.

4. Rule: Give higher priority to things that are harder to fix [if students come to college not having them], not things  that you hate to have to fix but that are easier.

5. Write a one page common agreement on priorities that both higher education and high school (1) accept as important (2) clearly understand.

[Post edited for clarification, 2/19/11]

What is the right sort of testing?

/ Bill McCallum / Leave a comment

Interesting article about testing in the New York times, which argues that the effort of retrieving information helps learning. Marcia Linn’s comment is relevant to the Illustrative Mathematics Project:

“More testing isn’t necessarily better,” said Dr. Linn, who said her work with California school districts had found that asking students to explain what they did in a science experiment rather than having them simply conduct the hands-on experiment — a version of retrieval practice testing — was beneficial. “Some tests are just not learning opportunities. We need a different kind of testing than we currently have.”