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Time Structures and the Canons of Testing

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Time Structures and the Canons of Testing CHAPTER 6 TIME STRUCTURES AND THE CANONS OF TESTING The first article of the July 1 2009 ASCD Smart Brief was a good news story on school improvement: Math educators at a struggling Florida elementary school locked away their textbooks before the start of last year, rewriting the curriculum themselves in an approach that helped them post large gains on state tests and raised their school’s grade from a D to a B. The teachers used a problem-solving approach with games and group projects to better engage students. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/woodlawn-elementary-thinks- outside-the-book-to-pull-d-to-a-b/1014663 As is often the case, examining the newspaper article in the Tampa Bay Times (Lim, 2009) showed that there was both more and less than meets the eye. The school had tossed out its math textbooks as a part of a school improvement strategy forced by the possible penalties of the US “No Child Left Behind” program. On the one hand, a cursory examination of the three years of achievement data contained in the newspaper article showed limited improvement in most of the indicators – the differences may or may not have been significant (there were no significance tests published). The increase most profiled was an increase of “struggling students who made gains in math” from 53% to 76% between 2007 and 2008. However – and this was ignored in the text of the article – the results for 2006 were 74%, almost identical to 2008. So in this one indicator, there was a major drop over one year what was corrected in the most recent year: leaving open the possibility that this was not ‘school improvement’ but simply cohort variation. In fact, the overall percent of students in the school meeting standards in math fell between 2007 and 2009 from 55% to 53%. The prioritization of (or obsession with) one-year changes on elementary school level results – which by their nature are highly variable – is an often criticized, but almost inevitable, result of the current atmosphere of school effectiveness. How we progressed to a stage almost identical to the obsession with truancy of a century ago is worth exploring in this chapter. As the development of compulsory schooling was being completed, attendance of all school-age children became mandatory. How did society ensure that this requirement was being adhered to and that this version of “the clock of schooling” was effective? We have described how attendance indicators were developed and used. The creation of the truant officer, coming from a policing perspective, used fear of punishment as the mark of success. But how does retribution fit as part of a positive approach to educational success? There are many reasons why children 107 CHAPTER 6 may skip school, and eventually the truant-officer approach morphed into trying to understand the reasons for truancy. The movement to make schools the focus of societal renewal led to employment of social workers, school nurses, and even other medical personnel. Schools became an important institution for ameliorating social, health and nutritional problems. The important idea is that for schools to be effective, students have to be healthy and happy. These are important outcomes for schooling, but the measure of school effectiveness that developed, and dominated in one form or another over the next century, was more in tune with measures of school achievement related to intellectual outcomes. How did this development arise? We want to tell this story in several parts. First, what is the history of the rise of the testing enterprise? Secondly, how do we locate its impact as a metric of educational effectiveness? THE RISE OF TESTING There were a number of activities that helped to formulate testing as the dominant metric over the century since compulsory schooling evolved. Some of these developments were concerned with studying individual differences and others were part of a larger pattern of social, economic and political issues. We offer a brief overview of some of these developments that have influenced the metric of testing as the dominant criterion for school effectiveness that continues to this day. The remainder of the chapter will take a closer look at recent emphasis on testing as a school effectiveness metric. Beginnings Many accounts of the history of testing begin with the creation of civil service examinations thousands of years ago in Imperial China. However, the major influence on educational testing began with the development of the science of psychology originally derived as a branch of philosophy. The pioneering work by Wilhelm Wundt and William James was instrumental in creating the field of experimental psychology. Attempts to study certain sensations, such as reaction time, helped to initiate the science of measurement of human abilities. The study of individual differences by Sir Francis Galton in England influenced Alfred Binet of France to create a scale that would help classify children in terms of their levels of mental ability. This work was initiated in an attempt to rectify misclassification of children who had behavioral issues but had been placed in mental institutions. This pioneering work which culminated in the Binet-Simon individual intelligence scale was transformed in 1916 by Lewis Terman of the United States into the Stanford-Binet scale, a widely used standardized intelligence test. Terman’s studies of giftedness were also heavily influenced by Galton leading him to define mental ability and genius in terms of an IQ metric. Advances made in the U.S. by James Cattell and Louis Thurstone helped to develop the field of psychometrics, so important in the understanding of mental abilities and 108.
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