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That's because, as per usual, they buried the lede. First, they cherry-picked studies. Second, the few studies they referenced addressed overall school perform
by daxorid 7y ago
That's because, as per usual, they buried the lede.
First, they cherry-picked studies. Second, the few studies they referenced addressed overall school performance, not performance of the gifted students.
A perfectly valid way of reading this article is: gifted kids in de-tracked schools do the teachers' jobs for them by helping out the slower kids, which results in better school performance.
- catalogia 7y agoIt may be the case that the gifted kids are helping slower kids score better, but not actually learn better. At least, that's what it was like when I was a kid. Teachers would constantly pair up smart kids with dumb kids for group assignments or study, and the smart kids would end up doing all the work. This benefits the teachers when they're evaluated by how well students are scoring.
- cortesoft 7y agoThey usually use test results to measure achievement, though, and the smart kids can't do that for the other kids (at least assuming they aren't cheating)
- catalogia 7y agoWhenever teachers realize they're being evaluated based on some metric, they almost immediately begin gaming that metric and with that it ceases to be a good metric. I had teachers give a lot of "group tests", walk out of the classroom during tests, etc. Standardized testing aims to correct this, but I think it's now considered by many teachers to be a joke. Even when exams are administered by independent proctors, teachers can still game the metric by "teaching the test" instead of imparting meaningful understanding of the material. I think this is a subject that will continue to defy rigorous objective scientific analysis.
- pingyong 7y agoTbh if you can "teach the test" without imparting meaningful understanding of the material, the test wasn't good the first place.
- catalogia 7y agoIt turns out creating "good tests" isn't so easy. Generally tests suffer from one or more of the following: subjective grading, game-able question formats, or superficial coverage of the material. Most tests administered by school teachers have very subjective grading. Basically every essay question has subjective grading, as do "show your work" math test questions. Multiple choice questions remove much of that subjectivity, but at the expense of a system that can often be gamed and often covers the subject matter in a superficial way. If incentives are correctly aligned, tests with subjective grading can work reasonably well. But when tests taken by students are used to evaluate the performance of teachers, the incentives of the teachers align against you. For wide scale experimentation, you want a test that actually measures meaningful understanding of the subject matter and at the same time can be graded objectively and at the same time defies the attempts of students, teachers, and school administerators to subvert the results. That's basically the holy grail of tests.
- pingyong 7y agoIt's definitely not trivial, but I think a solution would be to have tests that are, to a certain extent, subjective (I don't think they end up being that subjective in Math, and they'll always be subjective in English), and then they get graded by teachers from different schools.