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> would be to point that "teaching to the tests" concerns started and continued through a time that tests scores have decreased This is false. The concerns of

by mlyle 3y ago

> would be to point that "teaching to the tests" concerns started and continued through a time that tests scores have decreased This is false. The concerns of teaching to the tests, from my memory, peaked around 2005. No Child Left Behind was a major driver of these concerns, passed in 2001. Test scores peaked in 2012. This is exactly what you would expect if "teaching to the test" yielded a short term benefit but longer term harms, and was increasing during this interval. > Worse, I've seen students that did a lot of these supposed better methods fall flat on their faces when in a new environment. NTL did pretty simple experiments: teach something various ways, and see what ones resulted in best performance 6mos and 12mos later. Having students themselves pair off, teach, and explain ideas is the most durable thing we know. It requires active engagement with the material in order to reformulate it to help someone else through understanding. It requires being able to do this while multitasking and attending to social cues. And it can be a powerful motivator for students to fully understand before undertaking explanation. > (And a big "f you" to "sight words." I can't figure out what you're saying. "sight words" are a classic example of a hyper-focused rote memorization practice. I'm not saying rote is worthless. From my perspective, a perfect math class equally emphasizes intuition, rote practice, and rigorous explanation. What we tend to get, instead, is that once a student falls at all behind, they get 80+% rote practice. Worse, this practice is often subtly faulty and on topics that the student doesn't have the higher level explanations necessary to monitor their own performance.

taeric 3y ago
Teaching to the tests never stopped being a concern from the circles I can remember. No Child Left Behind is an interesting fence post on this, though. "Sold a Story" was rather effective at showing the major opposition to all things Bush in that legislation and how it backfired heavily for reading. As so many opponents of that act railed against how it was pushing for reading to be tested, and how we are still struggling from that. That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time. For teaching/learning, I confess I'm more partial to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/. I'm curious to know more on studies like this, so I'll be looking up some of the NTL studies you are referencing. Would be delighted if you have a good reference on them. My "f you" to sight words is just hearkening back to the "Sold a Story" thing. So many of the "best practices" for teaching reading from teachers centered around "sight words" and such. Which, I suppose you can frame that to teaching to a test. But I think it is more teaching the wrong things. And flat out not teaching any technique to reading. Which, that last is fully to your point. I don't want techniques ignored or passed over. So if there is large scale evidence that that is happening, I'm very interested in the evidence.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time. I'm consistently confused about what you're saying. Peaked during what time? You've said it peaked -after- test scores started declining. I said it peaked before tests started declining in 2012. It indeed peaked before 2012: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0dgnnq6&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... You'll find most of the most critical articles in 2001-2004 if you search past media results, too. There's been a bit of a recent resurgence. > For teaching/learning, I confess I'm more partial to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/. I have no problem with hard tests given to students as a learning tool, which is what your article advocates for. Indeed, I use difficult pre-tests a lot, and my target % correct on tests that I give to students is a 60% average, because this gives me the most statistical power to measure knowledge and students performance. Because a very large proportion of my students are above 80% in national norms, giving them a test that they'll miss 40% of available points is a quite difficult one. I am not a fan of tests used to measure educators: not because measuring educators isn't useful, but because I believe it incentivizes the wrong behaviors from educators. I consider myself fortunate to not be managed in this way. The time when I got close to this (teaching an AP class) is an experience that I don't really care to repeat, even though my students did well and and my class was one of the most popular at the school. I felt like I did not have enough freedom to do well (discussed above).
  - taeric 3y ago
    Apologies, went to sleep. I don't actually see a defined peak in that trend chart. Such that I'm not clear what point that is making, all told. Though, I also didn't claim that worries on "teaching to the test" had peaked. That is your claim. If it did indeed peak during that timeframe, I'd be game to see explorations of that. If the linked chart is all we have, that looks more like noise and hints that the regional variation in how hot of a topic it is dominates. Which could explain why you noticed it drop off in your circles, but I did not. I also fully suspect we would be in more violent agreement on these topics than this thread looks. :D I also do not like scoring teachers in that way, necessarily. I don't have a good alternative, but I fully agree that it screws up incentives and is the direct reason we get the degenerate cases. Cheating, in particular, being far worse than teaching to the test.

by mlyle 3y ago

taeric 3y ago

Teaching to the tests never stopped being a concern from the circles I can remember. No Child Left Behind is an interesting fence post on this, though. "Sold a Story" was rather effective at showing the major opposition to all things Bush in that legislation and how it backfired heavily for reading. As so many opponents of that act railed against how it was pushing for reading to be tested, and how we are still struggling from that. That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time. For teaching/learning, I confess I'm more partial to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/. I'm curious to know more on studies like this, so I'll be looking up some of the NTL studies you are referencing. Would be delighted if you have a good reference on them. My "f you" to sight words is just hearkening back to the "Sold a Story" thing. So many of the "best practices" for teaching reading from teachers centered around "sight words" and such. Which, I suppose you can frame that to teaching to a test. But I think it is more teaching the wrong things. And flat out not teaching any technique to reading. Which, that last is fully to your point. I don't want techniques ignored or passed over. So if there is large scale evidence that that is happening, I'm very interested in the evidence.

mlyle 3y ago
> That said, I do not have hard data here. Happy to be shown I was wrong that that peaked about that time. I'm consistently confused about what you're saying. Peaked during what time? You've said it peaked -after- test scores started declining. I said it peaked before tests started declining in 2012. It indeed peaked before 2012: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0dgnnq6&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... You'll find most of the most critical articles in 2001-2004 if you search past media results, too. There's been a bit of a recent resurgence. > For teaching/learning, I confess I'm more partial to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-it-wrong/. I have no problem with hard tests given to students as a learning tool, which is what your article advocates for. Indeed, I use difficult pre-tests a lot, and my target % correct on tests that I give to students is a 60% average, because this gives me the most statistical power to measure knowledge and students performance. Because a very large proportion of my students are above 80% in national norms, giving them a test that they'll miss 40% of available points is a quite difficult one. I am not a fan of tests used to measure educators: not because measuring educators isn't useful, but because I believe it incentivizes the wrong behaviors from educators. I consider myself fortunate to not be managed in this way. The time when I got close to this (teaching an AP class) is an experience that I don't really care to repeat, even though my students did well and and my class was one of the most popular at the school. I felt like I did not have enough freedom to do well (discussed above).
- taeric 3y ago
  Apologies, went to sleep. I don't actually see a defined peak in that trend chart. Such that I'm not clear what point that is making, all told. Though, I also didn't claim that worries on "teaching to the test" had peaked. That is your claim. If it did indeed peak during that timeframe, I'd be game to see explorations of that. If the linked chart is all we have, that looks more like noise and hints that the regional variation in how hot of a topic it is dominates. Which could explain why you noticed it drop off in your circles, but I did not. I also fully suspect we would be in more violent agreement on these topics than this thread looks. :D I also do not like scoring teachers in that way, necessarily. I don't have a good alternative, but I fully agree that it screws up incentives and is the direct reason we get the degenerate cases. Cheating, in particular, being far worse than teaching to the test.