Tuesday, April 24

Today we learned a lot of great random bits of information. For starters, we learned some background of standardized tests. All throughout my high school career we had to take various standardized tests, so much so that it was just accepted as a part of what we do. Today in class we learned about the first types of standardized tests, like where they originated from and what their original purpose was. It was so interesting!

Also, we learned what the letters in IQ stand for (Intelligence Quotient) and how the scores for that are fairly stable. At one point we discussed opinions on whether or not an IQ score could change. Personally, I think that an IQ score is more of a second-nature type thing that cannot be altered enough to say that it was changed in the first place. However, I'm sure with a little hard work one could boost their score a few points. Then again, what does it really matter any way?

This class has most definitely not been what I expected, but it's been a good one. I really have enjoyed completing Project 2 and am grateful for the time we've had to work in groups. Making out the test was kind of fun - I almost felt like a real teacher! Anyway, hopefully this habit of reflecting will continue.

James 3:1 says, "My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall reeve a stricter judgement." Even though this verse is talking more about teachers of the Word, it's a good reminder of the seriousness of our task as mind-molders. I'm thankful for this class and how it has helped me develop some important teaching skills.

Thursday, April 19

We met in our small groups today to finalize the last little bit left of project 2. As we were sitting there working through things, it was kind of neat to see that working together over these past few weeks has made us friends. I really hope that the other groups have had just as good of an experience working together as ours has.
After we talked through what's left, we decided to make the portfolio an individual assessment and the performance assessment a group project. We spent most of our time determining what we should do about the two assessments. I believe we started off by over-thinking what the questions wanted from us, but eventually came to understand what we were to do.

Tuesday, April 17

It seemed like a long time since we had last been in the classroom. With all of the end-of-the-year stuff going on, it's getting more and more difficult to separate things out on the timeline. Anyway, today we had some housekeeping-type things to talk through as a class, like when certain things will be due and what these next few weeks are going to be like. I think that taking the time periodically to make sure that everyone is on the same page is a good idea, not just so that we know when things are due but also that we are able to see how things are going. It was nice to have that time.
After that, we went over chapters 17 and 18. Chapter 17 was focused on what it means to create a reliable test as well as how to do that. Chapter 18 was mostly about test error and the fact that every test, no matter how small, will contain some degree of error within. These are some things to keep in mind for the future creation of tests.

Thursday, April 12

We took class time to meet with our subject area groups today to work on Project 2. Today we have finally reached the point of creating the actual test, so that was kind of exciting. We divided the questions among ourselves and decided to email what we come up with individually to each other before Sunday. Thinking up different questions is going to be a learning experience. This is kind of like when my sisters and I were little and we played school on the back porch of our old house. Every once in a while we would have "tests," although I don't believe we took the time to ensure that we were writing questions at any of the DOK levels.

Tuesday, April 10

We sure had a jam-packed day today, starting with graduate student research and ending with questions about Project 1, with a test review in there somewhere too. I really like the fact that we review the tests we take and go over the reason why certain answers are correct and why others are not. We talked about Project 1, which is basically just writing a letter to the parents of a child whose test scores we have been given to interpret. I hope that as a teacher in the future there will be time to do this for each of my children.

Thursday, April 5

Today I was thinking we would come in, talk about the test we took Tuesday, and leave. Instead we went over correlations and scatterplots and the different ways variables can be related. It was fun to have open discussion about some different relationships we see in life. One that particularly stood out to me was as the number of tests in a day increases, the grades on those tests decreases and the stress level increases. Oh, so true. We also talked about being careful when making assumptions about data that appear to be related. Just because a relationship appears to exist does not mean that it actually does. We said that the actual cause of the relationship may be another factor entirely. This was probably what happened in the case of the larger-foot children having larger vocabularies. Age might have actually been the factor in this.

Tuesday, April 3

Test Day: Round 2. The test itself was not too bad. As always, there were a few questions that I wasn't quite certain about, but overall it was a good test. It was nice to work through the math problems, like solving a logic puzzle. It still seems ironic to be taking a test in a class about testing. One of the problems required us to flip to the back of the page to get the information to solve it, and I remember talking about how we should avoid doing that because it stresses the test taker out. After experiencing that, I'll try to make sure to avoid that when creating tests of my own.