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> Is the teacher bad? Is the school bad? We don't know the answer to that question, but we do know that the student cannot solve the problem. This is importan

> Is the teacher bad? Is the school bad? We don't know the answer to that question, but we do know that the student cannot solve the problem. This is important. I do not want people to build bridges or airplanes who think physics is just a social construct. > As we should know as engineers, averages are a pretty garbage measure if that's all you have. But aren't they better than no measure? Would you support measurement with a higher degree of statistical fidelity with variances, distributions, and racial breakdowns? For most teachers and institutions (including Harvard), the answer to that latter question is "no", because it shines a huge light on institutional incompetence and failed promises around how increased funding and hiring should lead to superior outcomes.

klyrs 5y ago
In the context of an ESL student. Do we know that the student cannot solve the problem, or did they fail the "math test" full of word problems because it's effectively an english test? In college, I had an ESL math teacher who wrote extremely ambiguous questions, who "helped" students who asked for it by forking the answers over (even in exams, lol). I made a habit of finding all solutions to the problems as stated, which the teacher tended to mark wrong. I took this to the Dean of Math, and got the teacher into some hot water. Now, standardized tests can solve that particular problem -- but the teacher seemed to be quite fluent in conversation -- prepositions are highly nuanced and occur everywhere in word problems, which makes honest misunderstandings highly probable for non-native speakers.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > Do we know that the student cannot solve the problem Yes. Emphatically. The problem was right there on the page, and they did not give the correct answer. Answering a question in a language that is commonly used is part of the test. I also have perused the questions for this test and they do not require sophisticated lingual concepts to understand (and this test was for teachers!!!) But if a pupil cannot solve a problem because they do not understand the language well enough to properly obtain the correct answer... they do not have the skills to succeed in the world. This is a fixable problem, except of course many schools do not actually want to teach the predominant language for reasons having to do with political vote capture.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Wow, you basically didn't read what I wrote.
- abernard1 5y ago
  I did actually. What I understood and what the teachers understood and what the test taker understood and what society understood was: The person was given some questions and supposed to write the correct answers. I will not ascribe any moral worth to whether or not the person should have answered correctly given some hypotheticals, just that they did not. Similarly, I do not care if a person could have built the correct laminar flow equation for an airplane wing given a prompt in a language they may have not been familiar with, just that they did not.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    No, you actually did not. You went back -- in a reply to my comment -- to the topic of individual testing when I was speaking of a specific test, the Ontario EQAO which is about testing schools and rating schools and the grades for the children are often not even given out -- just the average for the school. And in this case, it is a blatant mis-use of averages and "standardized testing" for ideological reasons, brought in by a gov't that had a vendetta against the teachers union. These tests are not meant to provide guidance or assistance or measurement for the student to aid in education, but as a misguided "performance metric" for the school itself. And it's an unacceptable metric for the reasons I gave and which you did not address. The important information is lost in the process of taking an average. But, honestly, what has happened here is a trend I see on many of your comments, as I peruse your profile. You have a hammer, and every topic is your nail. But please, do go on, and bang away. You're clearly smarter than us all, and the downvotes you complain about only prove that.
    - abernard1 5y ago
      > And in this case, it is a blatant mis-use of averages and "standardized testing" for ideological reasons, brought in by a gov't that had a vendetta against the teachers union. And my response was that if we added more information and made it a statistically valid comparison, a "non-misuse" of data if you will, they would be even less likely to support it. Because it would show even more clearly that they are not successful at their jobs. These institutions do not want transparency and they've managed to argue an unfalsifiable position: that teachers are good and there's no reasonable way to measure how good they are, so stop trying.

klyrs 5y ago

In the context of an ESL student. Do we know that the student cannot solve the problem, or did they fail the "math test" full of word problems because it's effectively an english test? In college, I had an ESL math teacher who wrote extremely ambiguous questions, who "helped" students who asked for it by forking the answers over (even in exams, lol). I made a habit of finding all solutions to the problems as stated, which the teacher tended to mark wrong. I took this to the Dean of Math, and got the teacher into some hot water. Now, standardized tests can solve that particular problem -- but the teacher seemed to be quite fluent in conversation -- prepositions are highly nuanced and occur everywhere in word problems, which makes honest misunderstandings highly probable for non-native speakers.

abernard1 5y ago
> Do we know that the student cannot solve the problem Yes. Emphatically. The problem was right there on the page, and they did not give the correct answer. Answering a question in a language that is commonly used is part of the test. I also have perused the questions for this test and they do not require sophisticated lingual concepts to understand (and this test was for teachers!!!) But if a pupil cannot solve a problem because they do not understand the language well enough to properly obtain the correct answer... they do not have the skills to succeed in the world. This is a fixable problem, except of course many schools do not actually want to teach the predominant language for reasons having to do with political vote capture.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Wow, you basically didn't read what I wrote.

abernard1 5y ago
I did actually. What I understood and what the teachers understood and what the test taker understood and what society understood was: The person was given some questions and supposed to write the correct answers. I will not ascribe any moral worth to whether or not the person should have answered correctly given some hypotheticals, just that they did not. Similarly, I do not care if a person could have built the correct laminar flow equation for an airplane wing given a prompt in a language they may have not been familiar with, just that they did not.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  No, you actually did not. You went back -- in a reply to my comment -- to the topic of individual testing when I was speaking of a specific test, the Ontario EQAO which is about testing schools and rating schools and the grades for the children are often not even given out -- just the average for the school. And in this case, it is a blatant mis-use of averages and "standardized testing" for ideological reasons, brought in by a gov't that had a vendetta against the teachers union. These tests are not meant to provide guidance or assistance or measurement for the student to aid in education, but as a misguided "performance metric" for the school itself. And it's an unacceptable metric for the reasons I gave and which you did not address. The important information is lost in the process of taking an average. But, honestly, what has happened here is a trend I see on many of your comments, as I peruse your profile. You have a hammer, and every topic is your nail. But please, do go on, and bang away. You're clearly smarter than us all, and the downvotes you complain about only prove that.
  - abernard1 5y ago
    > And in this case, it is a blatant mis-use of averages and "standardized testing" for ideological reasons, brought in by a gov't that had a vendetta against the teachers union. And my response was that if we added more information and made it a statistically valid comparison, a "non-misuse" of data if you will, they would be even less likely to support it. Because it would show even more clearly that they are not successful at their jobs. These institutions do not want transparency and they've managed to argue an unfalsifiable position: that teachers are good and there's no reasonable way to measure how good they are, so stop trying.