brown(e)learning

There are three assignments due at the beginning of class next Tuesday.

1. The Project Proposal: Choose one of the assessment formats we’ve covered (traditional tests, performance assessments, portfolio assessments, or another) and blog a one-paragraph description of how you will use it. Tell me the types of tasks you will include in the assignment, how long it will be, etc. You may decide to revise (or leave out) some of your learning targets. Once you’ve submitted this assignment, we will negotiate its scope.

2. The reading: pp. 114-120 and pp. 296-308.

3. The Draft Blueprint: There is an example blueprint on p. 114 of the text. You do not have to follow that example, but you must create a document that describes your assessment and contains the same level of detail as the example in the book. Be creative! Because posting documents to your blog will be difficult, submit your draft blueprint to the discussion board on Angel (“Lessons->Turn in Your Assignments HERE->Draft Blueprint”).

[Trying desparately not to be too cheesey here.]

Hi, I’m Jeremy, and this is my blog. I just finished my second year as an assistant professor here at Brockport. My specialty is assessment & evaluation, so I teach this course plus a section of assessment for special education.

Something about myself: Because the Penguins and the Red Wings are in the Stanley Cup finals, I consider myself to be an ex-hockey fan.

If you in my summer section, be sure to leave a comment below. Use your real first name so I can give you credit.

I was thinking about the anecdote I shared with my Tuesday night section of EDI 603. We were talking about testing accommodations for students with special needs. A student asked if standardized tests, such as the SAT, offer accommodations. In response, I shared the story of a promising high school basketball player who failed to qualify for an NCAA scholarship because his SAT scores were too low. At the urging of a college coach, he was classified as learning disabled (specifically, a reading deficiency) and retook the SAT with no time limit. He passed and qualified to play the following season.

After class, I tried to remember where I had heard this story and decided to dig up the details. It turns out that I was mistaken on several key points, so I’m using this post to correct my comments.

I said the coach in question was from Georgetown University. It was actually George Washington University. Both are located in Washington D.C., but they have very different basketball heritages.

I said after the player passed his accommodated SATs, he didn’t earn high enough grades to play in college. This was not the case. In fact, he played his first college game before taking any college courses. His delayed SAT results kept him from enrolling, but not from playing.

The player, Shawnta Rogers, played four years at George Washington, was drafted into the CBA, and currently plays for Hyeres-Toulon, a professional team in Southern France.

By the way, the original story I read (which was the only source from the mid-1990’s I could locate) is on the second and third pages of this article in Sports Illustrated (February 5th, 1996).

Every teacher grades. Even teachers (or “learning coordinators”) in alternative programs must evaluate student work and progress to determine if and when students have proven an acceptable level of proficiency. Have you ever thought about what your grades mean? This assignment will force you to think about it and come to some conclusions about your grading system’s utility.

Step 1: List out the grades you give. A, A-, B+, B, etc. or E, S, NI, etc.

Step 2: Write two or three sentences describing each level. Describe what students at each level can and cannot do. A “level” may be “B- through B+,” but then make sure to include some differentiation between those sub-levels. NOTE: This is not a validity exercise (yet). You do not need to provide evidence supporting your assertions. This is also not a rubric, so you can be somewhat vague in your descriptions.

Step 3: Write two or more well-constructed paragraphs evaluating how well your grading system fulfills the needs of 1) students, 2) parents, and 3) school administrators, and shown in Figure 15.3 on p. 339 of the text.

You will be graded based on the completeness of your grade descriptions (did you include what the students can and can’t do? Did you consider both knowledge and skills? etc. Did you give any examples?) and the quality of your evaluation of your grading system. (Hint: I don’t expect your grading system to meet everyone’s needs.)

As always, spelling, grammar, and organization count. And (I shouldn’t have to say this) DON”T PLAGIARIZE.

If you seen the news coverage about two graduate students’ AERA paper wherein they connect Facebook use to lower grades, you’ve probably noticed the media’s inability to differentiate between correlation and causation.

It must be noted that this confusion is not the researchers’. In their first contact with the press, they were quite clear:

That disconnect between perception and reality does not necessarily mean that Facebook leads to less studying and worse grades — the grades association could be caused by something else. However, it does raise more questions about how students spend their time outside class on activities such as Facebook, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities.

…

However, Karpinski emphasized that correlation does not equal causation, meaning Facebook use might not be the culprit behind lower GPAs or less study time.

I shared that article with the students in my Tuesday section as an example of how one could explain the difference between correlation-causation. But I predicted that when the media picked up on the research, they would be warning parents to keep their college-aged children away from social networking sites.

I was right.

Too Much Facebook Might Ruin Your University Grades
Students Plus Facebook Equals Lower Grades
Facebook Makes You Fail, Twitter Makes You Callous
Facebook, Other Social Network Sites Could Lead to Lower Grades for Students
Facebook fixation harms student grades
Facebook making you stupid?
Study finds Facebook goofing hurts grades

It is important for you to declare (to yourself and to me) what you believe to be your assessment responsibilities. Nitko and Brookhart describe several potential responsibilities in Chapter 5 of the textbook. These include issues of assessment quality and fairness, as well as legal and social responsibilities. You will turn in a substantial blog post (five to ten well-constructed paragraphs) detailing the relationship between what you believe to be your fundamental assessment responsibilities and two (or more) examples from the text.

Specifically, your post will include the following:

1. An introductory paragraph with a summary of your beliefs
2. Three or more paragraphs stating whether or not you agree with two (or more) responsibilities described in the text. Note: You must agree with at least one of the responsibilities in the text, and you must disagree with at least one of them. It is paramount that you provide concrete rationales for your positions.
3. A concluding paragraph reiterating your beliefs and a summative evaluation of the appropriateness of the responsibilities presented in the text.

Spelling, grammar, and organization will all be included in the scoring of this assignment.

Well, it’s interesting if you’re into stats anyway.

Michael (from Section 02) took issue with some of my frowsy phraseology during our discussion of correlation. After class he made some good points, so I asked him to write up a blog post on the issues. You can read his various complaints against me, and my pitiful attempts at weaseling out of it, here: http://scooperdoo.blogspot.com/2009/02/entry-disclaimer-after-briefly.html

The long short of it are these four points:

1. Michael claims that correlating gender with something isn’t useful and elaborates this view quite well. I argue back several useful points that can be made using this technique.
2. He warned that you can’t really correlate anything that can be represented as a number. This is a very good point. Sometimes numbers are used as labels, so a higher number doesn’t mean a greater value of anything. However, I argue, you can still calculate a correlation coefficient in these cases; you just can’t interpret it to mean anything.(Also, something I didn’t put in my response to Michael: Zip codes are more meaningful than simple labels. Generally speaking, the further west you go, the higher the zip code. Brockport is 14420, Beverley Hills is 90210. I grew up in 95119. I’ll wager there is a strong correlation between one’s zip code and the time school starts – so long as time is measured in Greenwich Mean Time.)
3. Michael shows instances when we could expect to see correlation of 1.0 or -1.0, but admits these aren’t really in social science research. He just wanted to make sure you weren’t afraid of seeing a perfect correlation because they do exist.
4. He explains how causation could exist without correlation. I point out that his example does include correlation, but not a correlation coefficient.

If you ever hear anything in class that makes you go, “Huh? That’s not right!” I want you to blog about it. The blogs are your space, I just visit to gather assessment data. As long as we’re all respectful, I think we can have some very fruitful discussions.

As of this morning, Blogspot’s comment system was back online. I posted my comments (which I had saved in my gradebook) for section 01 learning targets. Be sure to check them as you write your final targets.

I’ll wait a day or two before I grade section 01 “My Fav Alt Assessment” posts, so go make your comments if you haven’t already. If you emailed me and your classmates your comments, you are not required to repost them to your classmates’ blogs.

Section 02: Make sure to comment on three classmates’ posts before class tomorrow.

I’ve received a couple of emails tonight from people who are worried that they cannot post comments to some of their classmates’ blogs. I’ve confirmed that the blogspot CAPTCHA (the system that verifies your humanity by asking you to type random warped letters) is currently out or order.

My suggestion is that you go to bed and try again in the morning. If it’s still not working, I’ll grant a grace period to Tuesday’s section for making comments on other people’s blogs.

Jason posted this comment to my post on the Kentucky bill that would fine parents who did not meet with their child’s teacher. It’s a great story, so I’m reformatting it as a blog post:

I would just like to put a personal slant on this subject. I completed my student teaching at Jefferson High school and was teaching 10th grade social studies. I taught approx. 140 students on a daily basis or at least had that many enrolled in my class. I did not understand how things are done in the city. First, they do not set up individual meetings or as it is sometimes called parent teacher conferences. They have one night in the fall and one in the spring that any parent can come to the school and meet with the teacher.

Well being a student teacher I called every single students house and also sent a letter home personally inviting the parents to the open house. I was very excited about doing this open house on my own since my supervising teacher was coaching this night. I was at the school from 6pm to 8pm and in this time I met with 1 parent.

It was unbelievable to me that 1 parent out of 140 came to see both who was teaching their child and also how they were doing. The next day I decide to ask the students why their parents did not show up to the open house. I believe the response I recieved bothered me more than anything else they could have stated. Most students told me that their parents believe that talking to a teacher would not change whether their child was successful in school. It is the teachers job to teach and if they get the student to learn the content then what are they going to do!

I believe that this type of thinking is a cultural and also socioeconomic problem in the United States. I would bet you would be hard pressed to find many teachers in either Appalachia or Rochester that has been challenged on how or why they are teaching or if the methods they are using are successful for their child. Again this is not a scientific hypothesis but merely an old student teacher observing a serious problem in American education.