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"increasing student test scores" Yes, paying teachers more for higher test scores is a very good way of increasing test scores - this was found in california s

by yuvouv 17y ago

"increasing student test scores" Yes, paying teachers more for higher test scores is a very good way of increasing test scores - this was found in california schools years ago. It had an opposite effect on students actual learning though.

jbellis 17y ago
Read TFA; they thought of that.
- btilly 17y ago
  Their way of accounting for it was to label certain parts of the test "conceptual" and look at performance on those parts as evidence of real learning. However that's still part of the test. Given two students whose understanding is the same, the one who is better prepared for the other parts of the test will have more time for the "conceptual" section and therefore will likely perform better there as well. That is assuming the unlikely proposition that preparing for the test doesn't directly prepare you for the conceptual portion of the test. I say unlikely because test makers have been trying to make such tests (eg the SAT) for decades, and test preparation companies (eg Kaplan) have been demonstrating that you can prepare for them after all. You can't escape the circularity. If you're measuring performance with a test, then you can't really distinguish preparation for the test from actual performance. In this study they had much stronger results in their second year, than their first. Which strongly suggests that teachers did a better job of preparing for the test after teachers saw the tests that would be used.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    They also accounted for it by studying performance on science and social studies tests. Both improved. However, it would be useful to follow up with a differently structured test to see how much comes from test prep. Incidentally, bringing up the SAT is a red herring. The SAT was originally meant to measure g/intelligence/"aptitude". It did this by measuring a body of knowledge which is not explicitly taught in school, giving questions like wheel : car -> pick one of [leg: horse, egg : chicken, computer : TV]. Obviously, you can improve performance by explicitly teaching that knowledge (e.g., memorizing analogies). A subject test does not suffer from this problem, since it is designed to measure subject knowledge rather than aptitude. You can improve performance on a multiplication test by memorizing multiplication tables, but so what? Multiplication performance is what you are trying to measure, it's not a proxy for something else.

by yuvouv 17y ago

jbellis 17y ago

Read TFA; they thought of that.

btilly 17y ago
Their way of accounting for it was to label certain parts of the test "conceptual" and look at performance on those parts as evidence of real learning. However that's still part of the test. Given two students whose understanding is the same, the one who is better prepared for the other parts of the test will have more time for the "conceptual" section and therefore will likely perform better there as well. That is assuming the unlikely proposition that preparing for the test doesn't directly prepare you for the conceptual portion of the test. I say unlikely because test makers have been trying to make such tests (eg the SAT) for decades, and test preparation companies (eg Kaplan) have been demonstrating that you can prepare for them after all. You can't escape the circularity. If you're measuring performance with a test, then you can't really distinguish preparation for the test from actual performance. In this study they had much stronger results in their second year, than their first. Which strongly suggests that teachers did a better job of preparing for the test after teachers saw the tests that would be used.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  They also accounted for it by studying performance on science and social studies tests. Both improved. However, it would be useful to follow up with a differently structured test to see how much comes from test prep. Incidentally, bringing up the SAT is a red herring. The SAT was originally meant to measure g/intelligence/"aptitude". It did this by measuring a body of knowledge which is not explicitly taught in school, giving questions like wheel : car -> pick one of [leg: horse, egg : chicken, computer : TV]. Obviously, you can improve performance by explicitly teaching that knowledge (e.g., memorizing analogies). A subject test does not suffer from this problem, since it is designed to measure subject knowledge rather than aptitude. You can improve performance on a multiplication test by memorizing multiplication tables, but so what? Multiplication performance is what you are trying to measure, it's not a proxy for something else.