In today’s Teaching with Technology
class we wrapped up the summer session discussing how technology will be making
its way into our standardized tests in the near future. I had not heard of the impending Smarter
Balanced Assessment that would be accompanying the common core standards in as
soon as March 2015. As this would be
during my first year of teaching (hopefully!) this is of great interest and
concern to me.
One aspect of this test that concerns me
that whether the test is good, bad, or neutral it will be difficult as a
first-year teacher to prepare students for a radically different test while we
are still navigating the waters of our standard teaching practices. It will only be a comfort that everyone else
will also be new to this particular testing style.
Another concern that I have about the
Smarter Balanced Assessment is the online format. So far in our teacher education we have been
learning about frameworks such as Reading Apprenticeship where we teach
students to ‘talk to the text’. These
techniques which have been proven to improve reading comprehension would not be
as feasible or as effective for readings done on a screen, where there is no
ability to highlight or annotate the text.
We would be asking students to do things that they are not ready
for. What would the solution to this be?
Structure our activities to match one assessment? Is that really doing the best thing for the
students?
While I do not have the answers to these
questions, and while I am by no means excited about its implementation, I do understand
that this is the direction the world is taking.
Getting students used to doing more things on a computer will only make
them more computer literate, a necessity in many modern jobs. Another plus of online testing is that they
can be made to adjust based on student responses, in this way testing could be
more accurate by asking more questions in a students ZPD.
Also as this is the last blog post for the summer class I will probably not be posting again until the fall. Not that I don't love blogging, but more that I think my computer and I are going to take a slight time out (Which I wish could start tonight, but there are papers looming in my very near future)! See you soon!
Lauren,
ReplyDeleteI blogged about similar concerns to yours regarding the Smarter Balance Assessment and the Common Core! I struggle with the idea of having to work on creating a valuable learning experience (I know this will be especially difficult in our first year of teaching) while simultaneously preparing our students for a test that they've never been exposed to, which is given in a format that they probably have little experience with (online). Like you, I have no answers to the questions you posed. I am hoping that through our classes the rest of the year and during our student teaching this school year we will gain some knowledge and understanding about how to do this effectively. I agree with you that one positive about online testing is the ability to zero in on a student's ZPD, like the GRE does. I wonder if the Smarter Balance Assessment does this? The name makes it sound like it does, but I don't remember if I actually heard whether or not that's true...
Can't wait to read your new blogs in the fall :)
Morgan
Hearing about the Smarter Balance Assessment came as a bit of a surprise to me too. What's especially concerning is that this assessment will be implemented during our first year of teaching, so they definitely won't have all of the kinks worked out yet. It was helpful discussing this in our discipline groups though, and talk about how we can structure our curriculum to help the students do well on the exam but not necessarily teach to the test. Like Morgan I'm hoping that we'll address this more and more in our classes as the year continues, and hopefully our mentor teachers will help us understand the implications and ways to be successful even more. Since we only really discussed our concern about kids becoming familiar with technology and how each discipline would tackle the issue, I'm wondering what issues came up in the science group. What things did you guys have to overcome when figuring out solutions?
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