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And when we test students a few months later on what they learned and remembered from that carefully designed curriculum, what do those outcomes look like?

quadrifoliate 4y ago
Curricula are typically designed for learning, not to guarantee outcomes on standardized tests. "But...we want a way to measure!" Keep thinking that way and you'll end up with a test prep industry for fourth grade. Take it from an immigrant who comes from that culture and hopes American schools don't get it any time soon. If you really want to measure progress on history and geography, you have to measure minor intangibles like whether your kid can find their neighborhood on a city map, or can recognize similarities between strategic problems in history and the problems that they face. I at least have not heard of any meaningful attempt to measure minute aspects like this, but would be interesting if there were any.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
(can't reply to the comment since it's too deep) Oh I agree with you that more standardised testing is not a solution, nor is more of what is already the default in North America. That being said, "But...we want a way to measure!" and "Curricula are typically designed for learning" are not opposed to one another. How do you know if learning took place without some sort of measurement? I'm not advocating for standardized testing; measure however you want. Measure by having a conversation with the student about the topic and see if they can make coherent sentences, if they can articulate what they learned, if they remember what they learned. But you still need to measure somehow, even if it's not quantitative. At the end of a semester of learning a new language (e.g. French or Spanish for high schoolers), can they pronounce they alphabet? Do they know the alphabet? Can they use basic phrases and sentences. If they can't, then that class was a failure.

quadrifoliate 4y ago

Curricula are typically designed for learning, not to guarantee outcomes on standardized tests. "But...we want a way to measure!" Keep thinking that way and you'll end up with a test prep industry for fourth grade. Take it from an immigrant who comes from that culture and hopes American schools don't get it any time soon. If you really want to measure progress on history and geography, you have to measure minor intangibles like whether your kid can find their neighborhood on a city map, or can recognize similarities between strategic problems in history and the problems that they face. I at least have not heard of any meaningful attempt to measure minute aspects like this, but would be interesting if there were any.

_aavaa_ 4y ago

(can't reply to the comment since it's too deep) Oh I agree with you that more standardised testing is not a solution, nor is more of what is already the default in North America. That being said, "But...we want a way to measure!" and "Curricula are typically designed for learning" are not opposed to one another. How do you know if learning took place without some sort of measurement? I'm not advocating for standardized testing; measure however you want. Measure by having a conversation with the student about the topic and see if they can make coherent sentences, if they can articulate what they learned, if they remember what they learned. But you still need to measure somehow, even if it's not quantitative. At the end of a semester of learning a new language (e.g. French or Spanish for high schoolers), can they pronounce they alphabet? Do they know the alphabet? Can they use basic phrases and sentences. If they can't, then that class was a failure.