Please refer to this week’s learning materials. They are intended to help you engage effectively in this discussion.
DueThursday
Brookhart and Nitko (2019) suggest that increased teaching, teacher effort, and working more effectively constitute “positive test preparation” because these actions result in increased student learning (p. 779). The authors, however, dissuade the use of high-stakes test preparation strategies such as coaching and the reallocation of instructional time and resources because they narrow the scope of what is taught in classrooms to cover only sample test items.
In today's high-stakes testing environment, consider how you, as a K–12 administrator, would respond to Brookhart and Nitko’s assertions.
Write a 250- to 300-word response to the following:
- Describe how Brookhart and Nitko’s assertion might apply to your school or school district.
- Share specific examples of how you might work with faculty to provide a learning environment that is not high stakes test centered. Include at least 3 steps that must be taken to ensure that this conversation with your faculty might result in improved teaching and learning at the classroom level.
1131486 - Pearson Education Limited © s would do very well on the test questions related to these concepts, and their test scores would be higher. However, your students would most likely not understand or integrate the broader social studies framework and the full set of concepts the course was supposed to teach. In other words, by narrowing your teaching to only those few tasks that appear on a specific test, you have failed to provide your students with empowering strategies to organize social studies concepts and principles. Further, you cannot interpret their test results as reflecting their general knowledge of the course concepts and principles. By teaching only those four concepts, you invalidated the students’ test results and corrupted the students’ education. The Range of Ethical to Unethical Practices You can provide a variety of practice activities to help students improve their performance on an assessment. Which of these is appropriate? The following list of assessment preparation activities is arranged in order from the most to the least legitimate (Haladyna, Nolen, & Haas, 1991; Mehrens & Kaminski, 1989): 1. Teaching the learning objectives in the curriculum without narrowing your teaching to those objectives that appear on a standardized assessment. 2. Teaching general test-taking strategies, such as those discussed in Chapter 14 , and integrating a variety of test-taking formats into teaching, so students learn how to respond to them. 3. Teaching only those learning objectives that specifically match the objectives that will appear on the standardized assessment your file://view/books/9780134807096/epub/OPS/xhtml/fileP700101520500000000000000000664B.html#P70010152050000000000000000067C2 file://view/books/9780134807096/epub/OPS/xhtml/fileP700101520500000000000000000664B.html#P700101520500000000000000000687E file://view/books/9780134807096/epub/OPS/xhtml/fileP7001015205000000000000000003491.html#P7001015205000000000000000003491 1131486 - Pearson Education Limited © students will take. 4. Teaching only those learning objectives that specifically match the objectives that will appear on the standardized assessment your students will take and giving practice on those objectives using only the same types of task formats that will appear on the assessment. 5. Giving your students practice on a published parallel form of the assessment they will take. �. Giving your students practice on the same questions and tasks that they will take later. Most educators would agree that the first activity is always ethical because it is the teacher’s job to teach the official curriculum. Most educators would also agree that the second activity, teaching students how to take tests and do their best on them, is not unethical. The fifth and sixth activities would always be considered unethical because they narrow instruction to only the specific assessment tasks that your students will be administered and practically eliminate your ability to generalize from the assessment results to the performance domain specified by the curriculum. Thus, the boundary between ethical and unethical test preparation practices falls somewhere between Activities 3 and 5. The deciding factor lies in the degree to which a school wishes to generalize the test results. The closer the activity is to the fifth one, the less able are school officials to generalize students’ assessment results to the official curriculum—unless, of course, the official curriculum is identical to the assessment instrument. Koretz and Hamilton (2006) summarize a somewhat broader set of test preparation steps that have been documented as responses to recent high- stakes testing: teaching more, working harder, working more effectively, reallocation, alignment, coaching, and cheating. Their criterion for positive or desirable preparation is the generalizability of test results, and thus test file://view/books/9780134807096/epub/OPS/xhtml/fileP700101520500000000000000000664B.html#P7001015205000000000000000006829 1131486 - Pearson Education Limited © preparation is desirable if it produces “unambiguously meaningful increases in scores” (p. 548). Teaching more, working harder, and working more effectively all therefore constitute positive test preparation, because increases in scores would mean increases in learning in the whole domain (reading, mathematics, etc.). Reallocation of instructional time and resources, coaching, and other practices, sometimes done in the name of “alignment,” that narrow the domain to only what is covered by the sample of test items are negative consequences of high-stakes testing, because increases in scores would mean increases only in the sampled part of the domain. And Koretz and Hamilton’s last category, cheating, never produces a valid increase in scores. 1131486 - Pearson Education Limited © Conclusion This chapter has explored the meaning of the term standardized test. What are standardized are the conditions of administration, procedures, and scoring so that possible scores are comparable across time and place. The chapter discussed the most common kinds of standardized achievement tests, along with their purposes and uses, and described how to follow directions for test administration. Finally, the chapter discussed ways to prepare students for standardized tests. The next chapter turns to interpreting the various kinds of norm-referenced scores that are provided in standardized test results.