Try Some More Sample Assessment Problems

This weekend, I posted a link to an international assessment test in response to a story about a school board member in Florida who tried taking that state's 10th grade assessment test and failing it pretty badly.  I thought that maybe parents would like to try some of the questions being asked of their children.

Today The Washington Post actually developed two short quizzes, one in math and one in reading, from some of the published questions from the FCAT, the actual test that the school board member took.  This allows us to try some of the questions from the test to see if we agree with the board member that the questions were irrelevant to the skills needed after graduation.

I took the reading quiz, and got all seven questions right, which I expected since English and the humanities were my strengths in school.  All seven questions related to analyzing the words and the meanings of two poems, which, while valuable, probably a minority of people do after they complete their formal education.  I would say that the questions related to vocabulary and interpreting literature in general, but they were not directly related to the reading skills most people need in the workplace.  (Note:  I'm not saying the test should necessarily be all about that, but I believe that was the argument that this board member was making.)

Then I took the math quiz, which was my weakest subject in high school, and was pleasantly surprised to get six out of the seven questions right (and the one I got wrong had to do with square roots, and I had no clue what some of the potential answers even meant).  But I think I lucked out on the test questions, because so many of they were graph interpretations or geometry or other math areas that I'm better at than what I think of as hard-core math...like the square root business.  I probably would have done much worse if there had been more questions.  According to the Washington Post, the math questions were also easier as a whole than the reading questions.  But because most of the questions related to ratios or graph interpretation, etc., I think most of these samples were the type of math people use in their post-school life.  Square roots---well, I never use them in "real life" (other than helping my son with his math), but maybe other people have more need for them in their daily affairs.

So, personally, the samples I took seemed like they were appropriate to the age level and setting.  But I would be glad to hear what other people think.  I think it is really important that when we discuss assessment, we have some actual experience of what the assessment questions are like.

The Post also had links to some samples for the state assessment tests in California, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Maryland, so you can check those out as well.

Are You As Smart As A 10th Grader?

If you would like a little taste of current assessment tests, a la board member from yesterday's post, you can click here to get to some sample reading, math, and science questions from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, global standardized test.  This one is geared towards 15 year olds, which in the US would be the end of the 10th grade.

The test has both questions and answers, so you can see how well you did.  You can share the good news/bad news below, along with any comments you have about how appropriate the questions are.

School Board Member Takes State Standardized Test and Fails

The Answer Sheet educational column in the Washington Post had an interesting article this week.  It dealt with a School Board member in Florida who took that state's standardized test for promotion to the next grade, a test called the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT.  FCAT is one of the oldest of the state assessment test, and has been held up as a model to other states that are newer to this type of high-stakes testing at the state level.

The board member, who is named Rick Roach and is on his fourth term on the Orange County, FL board, had questioned the value of the FCAT and arranged to take the 10th grade version of the test himself for a first-hand experience.  He admitted that out of 60 math questions, he didn't know any of them, but was able to guess correctly about 10 of them.  On the reading section, he only scored 62%, which is a D in their system.

Before you start thinking that this guy is a dumb loser, hear him describe his educational background:

I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities...

Hmmm.....well, maybe he just forgot what he learned in 10th grade.  However, he seems to be doing just fine without it.  This is his point about the test:

It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.

 Apparently, this experience relates to an argument that Roach has been having with colleagues on his school board.  This year, only 39% of Orange County (home to Orlando, FL and neighboring suburbs) 10th graders passed the reading portion of the FCAT.  Roach simply didn't believe that there were so many students who couldn't read, and began to wonder if the issue was with the test, not with the students' abilities.

Taking the test himself settled the matter for him.  Here are his conclusions about the test (according to the Washington Post)

If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had. 

It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How? 

I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

I think this is a great perspective on the whole rush-to-tie-everything-to-standardized-testing drive in school reform.

Linchpin's Seth Godin: "School is a complete failure...and College is an even bigger scam"

For a much shorter critique of the current American K-12 and college educational system, you may want to watch this short video of an interview with Seth Godin.  Godin is the author of Linchpin, a book that discusses those key individuals that drive organizations that make a difference, along with how you can become one of those particularly-influential people.  However, in the video below, "playing by the rules" that you are taught in school appears not to be one of his techniques to the top.  Like the PRO side of the "Do Too Many People Go to College?" question, or the studies that suggest attendance at highly competitive schools produces no educational gains over comparable peers at traditional schools, Godin also questions the investment of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college degree.

If you are homeschooling, he has some kind words for you.  However, he also suggests how parents can make things better in their children's schools.

But you can hear the man himself explain his views on education in 4:36 in the video below:

Poverty: The Factor Educational Reformers Don't Want to Consider

Amidst all the debates about charter schools and Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, educators may have missed the latest report that 22% of children are now living in poverty--the highest figure since 1993.  But that is a shame, because that fact is likely to have more of an impact on student test scores than all the policies enacted by all the politicians put together.

At the end of last year, there was a whole hullabaloo about the fact that US students only scored around average or below on the international PISA test scores.  YIKES!  AMERICAN SCHOOLS ARE FAILURES!!!!!

Except, on further analysis of the data, it doesn't really reflect poorly on American schools.  Instead, our poor showing internationally doesn't really seem to be based on our school system at all.  Rather, it speaks to the shocking fact that in a country of such abundance, one out of every five children lives in poverty....one of the highest levels of poverty among the OECD countries with whom we have been compared.

How can I say that?  Because the National Association of Secondary School Principles analyzed the data by separating it by the level of poverty in the schools (as measured by the number of students eligible for free or reduced lunch programs).  IN EVERY CASE,  the US students came in FIRST when compared to countries in the same poverty range (in many cases, the other countries has MUCH lower poverty rates, but at least fell into a comparable range).

So, for American kids who went to school in relatively rich schools (defined as schools where less than 10% of students had incomes low enough to qualify for lunch programs)....well, they kicked the butts of the top-ranked Finnish students (with a mere 3.4% of poverty level) by scoring 551 to the Finnish 536:

Country	Poverty Rate	PISA Score
United States	<10%	551
Finland	3.4%	536
Netherlands	9.0%	508
Belgium	6.7%	506
Norway	3.6%	503
Switzerland	6.8%	501
France	7.3%	496
Denmark	2.4%	495
Czech Republic	7.2%	478

OK, so that include all those Ivy League feeder prep schools and such... but what about just those middle/upper middle class schools, where, say, 10-24.9% of students qualify for lunch program?

Country Poverty Rate PISA Score United States 10%-24.9% 527 Canada 13.6% 524 New Zealand 16.3% 521 Japan 14.3% 520 Australia 11.6% 515 Poland 14.5% 500 Germany 10.9% 497 Ireland 15.7% 496 Hungary 13.1% 494 United Kingdom 16.2% 494 Portugal 15.6% 489 Italy 15.7% 486 Greece 12.4% 483

Source for all figures:  NASSP

OK, well, how about our poor schools and our REALLY poor schools?  Even compared to the OECD countries that have a higher than 50% poverty rate (Austria, Turkey, Chile, and Mexico), the US students still did better.   So, when you compared apples to apples, the US students always came up on top, no matter how sweet or sour the apple selection was.

So according to the data, US education is doing an exemplary job at all levels--high income through low income student populations.  Why, then, is "school reform" so fixated on blaming bad teachers and their "gang," the EVIL teachers' unions, for all of our educational woes?

My answer?  It's back to my educational days as an existentialist.  Existentialism argues that people will do anything to avoid facing up to their own responsibility.  It is so much easier to blame uncaring and inadequate teachers, and one-sided teachers unions, and regulation-bound public school administrators, than to ask ourselves:  How is it, that in a country that has so much, and so many live such abundant lives, that somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of our children live in poverty?

Hey, rather than admit that I'm part of the systemic poverty problem, I would rather blame those uncaring teachers and inflexible administrators myself.  The thing is, I don't actually know any educators like that....

Majority of Texas Middle and High School Students Suspended At Least Once

In the debate this week, it appears the single major word that Texas Governor Rick Perry used most often was "border."  Many uses of that term came as he talked about how dangerous things are along the Texas-Mexico border.

However, it appears that the border line isn't the only dangerous place in Texas.  A six-year study of one million students in Texas--all the 7th grade public school students in Texas in 2000, 2001, and 2002--discovered that between 7th-12th grade, nearly 60% were expelled or suspended from school at least once.  Because only a small fraction of these cases (3%) were legislatively-mandated (violations such as illegal drugs or bringing a weapon to school), it indicates that the vast majority of these suspensions or expulsions were done at the discretion of the school.

The study, which was conducted by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University,  considered many variables, including age and income level, but found that only two sub-populations in the student body had higher-than-average suspension/expulsion rates:  African Americans and student with certain learning disabilities.  The data reported that 75% of African American had some form of discipline, compared to 65% of Hispanics and 47% of white students.  For students with educational disabilities, 75% of all disabled students, and 90% of students with an emotional disability, were expelled or suspended at least once, compared to 55% of students without any recorded disability.

The report also addresses the consequences that being suspended or expelled has on student success.  Of the 60% of students who had been so disciplined, 31% were held back for at least one year (which many previous studies link to poor academic achievement and higher drop out rates) and 10% officially dropped out (the study also notes that the system underreports how many students have actually dropped out but haven't completed the official paperwork confirming that decision).  Among the 40% who made it through school without suspensions or expulsions, 5% repeated at least one grade and 2% officially dropped out before graduation.  Even worse was the correlation between suspensions and expulsions to being involved in actual crimes; of those who had been so disciplined, almost a quarter eventually became involved in the juvenile justice system, compared to only 2% among the non-disciplined population.

The problem with reports like this is that they are only dealing with numerical correlations, not cause and effect.  So how people interpret the results probably depends on whether your world view is more Hobbesian (who described the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”) or Rousseau-ian (who argued that poor human institutions warp people's natural tendencies towards both self-sufficiency and compassion).  That is, some people think that the high number of drop-outs and juvenile offenders among those who have been disciplined is just common sense; their innate bad behavior and/or anti-social principles showed up in school, and was properly disciplined, before they engaged in actual crimes or stopped bothering with school.   Thus, the students' bad character was the cause of both the suspension/expulsion and the dropping out/juvenile crime.  Others, however, wonder to what extent such harsh discipline actually caused the high drop out and juvenile justice figures.  This side would argue that when struggling students are banned from school (for a short term or permanently), that encourages them to spend their time with "bad influences" and/or have more time and opportunity to get into trouble.  In addition, students who have been suspended or expelled probably have more negative feelings about school--either around their ability to succeed there, or whether it is a hostile and unfair, rather than a nurturing and encouraging, place to be, which effects their decisions about whether or not to continue their education and to pursue fields outside the illegal alternative available to them.  The study, however, does not contain the kind of information that helps to support or refute either interpretation.

And I don't know about you, but my immediate reaction to these findings were "They suspend or expel 60%?  Surely they can't have THAT many "bad" students in Texas!  If so, the Wild, Wild West ethos must still rule in the Lone Star state."   But am I just uninformed?  How far from the "norm" is a 60% suspension/expulsion rate?  It turns out that is a hard question to answer, because the study had a more comprehensive database and addressed the question in a way that hadn't been done before.  So I was never able to find a national average for suspensions and expulsions (although, I will  admit, this was not an exhaustive effort....given that this blog is done with the time and money I have to spare after everything else I do).  But I did find at least some information in my home state of North Carolina.

While North Carolina generally collects suspension and expulsion data in a different way--it is much more focused on the number of missed days, rather than the percentage of students--I did find one report from the state Department of Education that stated that in 2006, approximately 10% of North Carolina students had short-term suspensions.  That statistic was for the entire school system, but let's just assume that percentage applies to middle and high schoolers, since that is what the Texas study covered.  But that is just short term discipline, and doesn't include long-term suspensions or expulsions.  I believe the Texas study said that 70% of its disciplinary actions were short-term, so if we apply the same statistics to North Carolina and round out the numbers (generously), then that would mean that about 15% of North Carolina students had been suspended or expelled in 2006.

If that figure was accurate, then that would indicate that about four times the number of secondary students in Texas had been suspended or expelled, compared to those in North Carolina (in terms of percentages, not in actual numbers, since Texas is a much larger state).  Is Texas so wild that four times as many student misbehave?  Or is something else going on?

There was one other interesting data analysis that was included in the report.  The researchers actually divided the schools into three different categories, based on such demographics as family income level, percentage of immigrants or migrants, size of school, etc., and predicted whether disciplinary actions would be at a low, average, or high level.  But when they looked at the three categories, they found that about half reported the "expected" number, but a little less than a quarter had higher than expected percentages, while a bit more than a quarter had lower than expected numbers of disciplinary actions.  This was true regardless of expected level of school, size of school, type of school, or year of analysis.  And the good news was that those that had fewer percentages of students suspended or expelled certainly did no worse than those with average or even high numbers of disciplined students.

So the bottom line is, looking at the entire Texas secondary school system, is that suspending or expelling students is associated with dropping out or getting involved with the juvenile justice system.  But individual schools have a lot of discretion about whether or not they suspend or expel students.  Those who have a more lenient disciplinary system don't do any worse than the schools with higher percentages of disciplined students.  But there is obviously a lot of leeway between schools about who--and how many--are being suspended or expelled.

And either Texas is a LOT tougher on students than North Carolina, or they have a LOT more bad seeds--like four times as many.   Whether you think that is good or bad...well, like I said in paragraph 5 above, that probably depends more on your underlying assumptions about people than any statistics I can report.

Traditional Schools in LA's Lowest-Performing Areas Raised Scores More Than Charters, so Wal-Mart Gives $15 Million...for More Charters

More bad news for the charter movement came out of LA this month--well, bad news in terms of actual student outcomes.  But that didn't keep the founders of Wal-Mart from donating $15 million to add 20,000 more charter students in LA and 100,000 more throughout California.

A study this month by the Los Angeles Times compared test scores among K-12 students in the city's lowest-performing areas, and found that the traditional public schools had done a better job overall at raising student performance than had the comparable charter schools, even without additional resources that had been given to the charters.  In the most dramatic case, the increase among high school students who were performing at "proficient" levels was almost double that of the high schools run by other organizations.

As in the other study I discussed lately, which showed that LA charter schools had dramatically higher teacher turnover rates, it is hard to draw conclusions from a single study about such a complicated topic as educational performance.  Also, Los Angels obviously has some conditions that make it different from much of the rest of the country, although it gets a lot of focus when it comes to charter schools because it is the school district with the largest number of charters, both in terms of number of schools and number of students.

However, these and some other research certainly suggest that charters are not clearly outperforming the traditional educational systems they seek to replace.  But that does not seem to dissuade the well-funded proponents of the charter movement from continuing to pour more money into these experimental systems. Hence, the $15 million gift from the Walton Family Foundation to the California Charter School Association, only weeks after these studies announcing negative trends in charter school performance.

Charter schools are experiments, and it is the nature of experiments that some, many, and even most are going to fail.  But it is important for parents, beguiled by the hype of media like the tear-jerking "Waiting for Superman," to remember that these charter schools ARE experiments, and there is no guarantee what will happen if their child happens to get in.  Charters may end up being like the fantastical Willy Wonka story:  You may feel like the luckiest child in the world if you get one of the golden tickets, and at least some will succeed tremendously, but once you are in the chocolate factory, how many will end up turned into blueberries, shrunken, or fallen down a garbage chute?

Matt Damon's Pep Talk for Teachers (and Parents)

Everyone may have already seen Matt Damon's keynote speech at this weekend's Save Our Schools rally.  If you haven't heard about Save Our Schools, it was a rally held last weekend in Washington DC to show support for public schools and to protest the extensive use of high-stakes standardized testing to evaluate both students and teacher on its performance.  Although it drew some of the biggest names in the alternative education reform camp (that is, the Diane Ravitches and Alfie Kohns, not the Bill Gates and Michelle Rhees), unfortunately, it tended to be overshadowed by all the drama on Capitol Hill about the debt ceiling increase.

Matt Damon flew overnight from Vancouver, where he is filming his latest movie (hence the bald head) to give his support to the cause and to speak out against the overuse of standardized testing.  But even more, he spoke of his appreciation for teachers, and let them know how grateful people are for the tough but invaluable work they do.  He was introduced by his mother, who was, and maybe still is, a school teacher.  And he did was is really the ultimate reward that those of us who teach, or those of us who parent, fantasize about.  He acknowledged that an important part of who he has become and the success that he has achieved has come from the support and education he received from his teachers and his parenting (he does mention the last one specifically as well).  He said he knew it wasn't always easy, and he was thankful.

So I think this is a great video to have on hand for those days when teaching, or being a mom or dad, just seems really frustrating and thankless work.  Our students or children may not be able to communicate this feeling, but I'm sure they would if they could.  And it also reminds us that maybe we ought to take time to thank our own parents and teachers for the difference they have made in our lives.

You can watch Matt's mother's introduction, and then Matt's talk here:

Arguments Against the Case for Standardized Testing in Education

Is the use of standardized tests improving education in America?  That is the latest question posed by ProCon.org, a website that takes controversial issues, lists claims and studies by proponents on each side, and describes the background and development of the topic in order to promote critical thinking and a more informed public on major social issues.

So on the standardized testing page of ProCon, they list 22 arguments in favor of testing, and 23 arguments against.  Of course, in the nature of most educational issues, that means that there are a lot of cases of "this study demonstrates X, this study demonstrates the opposite."  It brings to mind Andrew Lang's quip about using "...statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination."

And I know I'm biased, because I am a strong opponent of the current trend in education towards high-stakes testing in education (as regular readers to this blog already know).  But a lot of arguments on the PRO side of the standardized testing debate just make me crazy.

A prime example is the first sentence in the first pro-testing claim:

1. 93% of studies have found student testing, including the use of large-scale, standardized tests, to have a "positive effect" on student achievement.

What is left unsaid at the end of that sentence is "...student achievement, as measured by standardized tests." So, basically, it is telling us that using a lot of standardized tests improves students ability to do standardized tests.  As the young people today would say, DUH!  Similarly, a large-scale, standardized student basket-weaving test would result in greater student achievement in basket weaving.  That statement alone says nothing about the quality or value of students doing better on tests; it merely says that as students are forced to take more tests, they get better at taking tests.  That is also the gist of pro arguments #3, 5, 7, 15, 19, and 20.

Then there is another whole clump of arguments based on statistics that show that people support testing.  Thus, pro arguments #9, 10, 11, 12, 14, and 16 cite studies that show parents, teachers, college professors, and (here is my favorite) students support testing.  Students?  Really?  I've known a lot of preschoolers getting ready for kindergarten, and I've known them to be excited about the big yellow school bus, about having a lunchbox and a pencil case, about making new friends, about having a wonderful teacher, even about the things they will get to learn, like learning to read and write and add numbers and such.  But I've never known one who was looking forward to getting tested in school.

This supposed support by students is the best demonstration of what I think is the real reason behind all this alleged support, which in many cases is cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance is the internal discomfort we feel when we are faced with two conflicting beliefs or experiences.  Psychological theory says that when we encounter cognitive dissonance, that either we change our actions, behaviors, or beliefs to eliminate the conflict, or find some way to rationalize it or explain it away.  A classic example is the Aesop Fable about the fox who, unable to reach some delicious-looking grapes hanging from a high tree branch, decides that they must be sour, so he doesn't really want them anyway.

In this case, particularly with students, I think it operates the opposite way.  For the most part, children don't get to choose whether or not they come to school and get tested.  They may not like it, but they trust us and believe we are doing what is in their best interest.  So they might say they support testing, because they are forced to do it anyway, and they want to believe it is for a good purpose.  And the ones that really can't deal with testing are gone; either, if they are lucky, they are being homeschooled or are in some other kind of alternative educational setting, or if they aren't, they have dropped out or flunked out.

The same thing is true of parents; since their children are forced to take the tests, parents want to believe it is for a good purpose.  And I think cognitive dissonance may be worst for the teachers, many of whom feel deeply from their professional training and experience that such high-stakes testing is not the best educational approach for their students.  It think it is a major contributor to the high levels of teacher stress and burnout that we are seeing today (although I don't have any statistics to back me up...but I do get that feedback from a lot of my friends who are teaching in the public schools).

Then there are a bunch of random pro arguments that just make me grind my teeth, like everyone's favorite "educational reformer," Michelle Rhee, who says it would impinge on the "civil rights" of  non-English speaking students to allow them to take tests in their native language, or the one that says we give doctors and airline pilots high-stake tests before allowing them to operate or fly a plane, so it must be OK to do that to (in the case of North Carolina) third graders.  Yeah, right....

But here is my BIGGEST issue with all the high-stake testing advocates.  Our differences are summed up in their pro argument #17:

Teacher-graded assessments are inadequate alternatives to standardized tests because they are subjectively scored and unreliable. Most teachers are not trained in testing and measurement, and research has shown many teachers "consider noncognitive outcomes, including student class participation, perceived effort, progress over the period of the course, and comportment," which are irrelevant to subject-matter mastery.

Since when did we reduce our children's education to nothing but subject-matter mastery?  That was not the goal of school in "the olden days," when all these reformers claim that education did such a better job.  During the great growth years of 1850-1950, the primary purpose of the schools was to teach children, many of whom were immigrants from all over the world, what it was to be a good American.   That meant teaching them reading and writing and math, of course, but it also meant teaching them the skills required to get a job and the skills required to participate in the American system.  That meant teaching them skills like responsibility and cooperation and tolerance and sometimes sacrifice.   It encouraged students to learn to work hard and to play fair, to appreciate what American democracy had to offer and to do their part to keep the American system strong.

Now, to a large extent, I think American school still teach these things.  But statements like the one above proclaim that active participation, hard work, demonstrated educational progress, and good behavior are "irrelevant."  And that makes me REALLY crazy.

Do You Know As Much U.S. History as the Average 8th Grader?

Fortunately, it turns out that I do....at least in terms of the sample questions provided for the history section of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment test, a national program to track U.S. students' achievement in different topics over time.

The NAEP released the history results for 2010 recently, leading its press release with the news that scores in the three grade levels tested--4th, 8th, and 12th grade--had all risen since 1994.  It did not emphasize the fact that only the 8th grade scores had increased significantly since the most recent previous test, which was in 2006.  The results also show that while 69% of 8th graders showed they had acquired a Basic level of understanding of U.S. history, only 17% achieved the Proficient level, and only 1% scored at an Advanced level.  The numbers in the 12th grade were even more dismal:  45% were Basic level, 12% were Proficient, and 1% were Advanced.

Because I like these things, I tried the five sample questions given for each of the three grade levels, and managed to get all five questions right in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grade levels (although I think one of the 8th grade questions was poorly developed).  To get a better idea of the level of these questions for students, rather than adults, I asked my 12 year old son, who has just completed 6th grade, to take all three sets of questions.  He got all five questions right at the 4th grade level; overall, 46% of 4th graders got those five questions right.  He missed one, or scored 80%, on both the 8th grade and 12th grade tests, compared to 45% overall correct responses among 8th graders and 56% overall of the 12th graders getting them right.

Other than the one question in the 8th grade set, I thought they were generally good questions--better than the ones my son took in his Iowa Basic Skills history assessment test this year, in my opinion.  And obviously they can't be THAT tough if my 6th grader can score that high on even 12th grade questions.

So I'm glad to see that things are better than 16 years ago.  But I don't think the results are really very good.  Once again, I think it demonstrates that subjects that aren't on the high-stakes test are getting a short shrift in our schools.

Try out the test questions yourself here and see what you think.  Let us know your opinion in the comments below.

Electronic Portfolios and Keeping Promises

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on "How Do You Know When You Are Done?"  It is a larger philosophical question (you all do know that I was a philosophy major for my undergraduate degree, don't you?), but for our homeschool, the practical answer is "The Cary Homeschoolers Student Showcase," which occurs on the first Saturday in June.  So this week--the week before the Student Showcase--is always kind of a crunch week for us.  Not only are we preparing our display for the Showcase, but I actually coordinate the whole event, so there are all those last-minute administrative details to take care of.  Plus, we try to get our annual required testing done before then (which we actually completed a couple of weeks ago, thank goodness) and any last minute curricula that aren't totally complete (for example, being the total grammar Nazi that I am, I am trying to get him to do over any grammar unit that he didn't score at least 90% on the online test for that competency).

Our big project this week, however, is producing an electronic portfolio of the past 12 months of his work. I really think that is a better way of capturing his growth over the past year than grades or test scores can ever do.  But like many things, it is something that I LOVE to have once it is done, but struggle through in actually doing.

This year, however, I'm doing something different.  Whereas for his elementary school years, I produced the entire portfolio (that is, I recorded a soundtrack of him talking about his favorite things in math, science, history, art, literature, and the like, then edited it, then found graphics to go along with the soundtrack),  this year I am sharing the load with my first-year-of-middle-schooler.  So we are recording the soundtrack together, then I am editing it, but he is the one adding the pictures to the soundtrack (with some fine-tuning from Mama, of course).  My goal is for him to be doing this on his own by high school

So today was a really heavy portfolio day.  We worked on our two heaviest curricular areas this year--History/Social Studies and Language Arts.  We finished the History part his morning, then worked away this afternoon and evening on Language Arts.  I had edited that soundtrack, then spent at least an hour getting it fixed after the computer suddenly didn't recognize the file type (don't you love computers?), then turned it over to him for graphics while I cooked dinner.

So for the entire time I was cooking dinner, there were literally screams coming from upstairs at the computer.  The language arts portfolio can be challenging, because it is about reading and writing, which aren't really very photographic activities.  But I kept sauteing my onions and boiling my pasta and calling up to my son, "You can figure it out."

And you know what?  He did.  He downloaded some screen capture software, installed it, learned how to use it, and captured screen shots of my blog and his, all while I was making the sauce.

But after dinner, it still wasn't finished, and he didn't know what to do about this part and that part, etc.  So you know what I did?  I went and took a bath.  If you were reading my blog at the beginning of the year, you will know I wrote a post about how taking more baths would make me a better mom, person, teacher, whatever.   It's when things are stressful and time is tight that you really need to take some self-care measures, which for me is taking a bath.  Plus, it removes me from the temptation of swooping in and taking over for my son, who I know that, no matter how much he complains, can get this thing done.

So I took a bath and read some fluffy chic lit book, and lo and behold, the thing got done while I was relaxing.

What a great lesson and accomplishment for both of us!