Posted by: Cynic
on 17, Aug, 2010
Been following stories and tweets about the name and shame approach of the Los Angeles Times’ article, “Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?” (August 14th).
It led me to some interesting and valuable research including the IES report Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains:
Our results are largely driven by findings from the literature and new analyses that more than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under the control of the teacher. Thus, multiple years of performance data are required to reliably detect a teacher's true long-run performance signal from the student-level noise. In addition, our reported sample requirements likely understate those that would be required for an ongoing performance measurement system, because our analysis ignores other realistic sources of variability, such as the nonrandom sorting of students to classrooms and schools (Schochet & Chiang, 2010, p.35)
Posted by: blogger
on 06, Jul, 2009
By Winged Avenger
If key competencies are the threads that help to stitch the various parts of the New Zealand Curriculum together, what does this mean when we measure students' progress?
The answers to these questions are well understood by secondary teachers. We understand that the KC threads need to be woven together with subject knowledge and skills, to create relevant and authentic learning experiences.
Posted by:
on 23, Mar, 2009
PPTA is very interested in what will come out of the work on developing national standards on literacy and numeracy. We will be part of the reference group for this work, and we'll be making sure that it links well with current work on literacy and numeracy for NCEA. It's good to see that the government is not proposing national testing, because there is ample evidence from failed overseas experiments that this is a disaster for kids' learning. However, even this business of writing standards has some huge risks.
