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.

Thursday, March 29

Today this class was spent practicing some problems for the test Tuesday. I was not present, though. My little sister had a tennis match in Laurel so some friends and I went to watch her play. After a few wrong exits we finally made it to the park! It was a close match, but she and her doubles partner won in overtime. Go Knights! As a future teacher, I think it's really important to be supportive of my students outside of the classroom in order to better help them prepare for the tests of life.

Tuesday, March 27

Today we talked about some more statistics as well as some different types of calculations, like determining the z-score and the T-score, and the variance. Honestly, I was not really sure what was going on today, but I decided to definitely give it a look over later. We are supposed to have a practice day Thursday before the test, so hopefully it will make more sense then.

Thursday, March 22

Today we met in our small groups again to create our test blueprint. I thought this was going to take a really long time, but in reality it only took about thirty minutes! It's good to know that it doesn't take very long to create something so useful. When we were talking about this in class the other day, I was thinking about how it sounded like something that would become kind of a hassle. However, this really wasn't too bad. I had a lot of fun working together today. I really hope whatever school I get placed at has a good group of science teachers to collaborate with.

Tuesday, March 20

So, today we talked about Statistics. It was a long chapter - very informative, but long. When we talked about distributions, at first it was a little confusing to understand the negative and the positives. After a few times of going over it though, it started to make sense. I can see how better understanding statistics would be beneficial as a future teacher. Also, it was good to go over percentiles. That's always been one of those terms that I've heard but have never understood. In other news, it's the first day of spring! We had a really nice picnic earlier today.

Thursday, March 8

After not meeting on Tuesday, it felt a little strange to be back in the classroom at first. We covered Chapter 12, which is all about marks. We discussed how a mark is a measure of student achievement and so should not take into account things like behavior. Also, we talked about how different areas use different grading scales (i.e. an 'A' at one school may not be an 'A' at another school because of the different normal values that represent letter grades). We turned in our project from Tuesday. All in all, it wasn't a too bad kind of class period.

Tuesday, March 6

Instead of meeting for lecture, today our class met within our content area groups to begin working on Project 2. Our assignment for the day was to complete parts A and B. We wrote out some objectives for DOK levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 and then checked that they each meet certain requirements. It took us a little while to determine what topic we wanted to cover, but eventually we decided to create a test on the seven major terrestrial biomes. It was nice to collaborate with other "teachers" to complete a project. As we worked, it felt as if we were really doing this at some school, that we were in actuality seated around some spare table in a teacher's lounge and planning a unit for the next few weeks. Days like today make me realize how exciting it's going to be to finally be able to create plans for my own students.

Thursday, March 1

Today has been a LONG day, but this class was pretty interesting! We went into a lot of detail about how to create a test. This is the kind of stuff I've been expecting us to talk about all along, so it was neat to have finally reached this point. We talked in depth about ensuring that the test has validity and different factors that could impair test validity. I had never really considered the importance of ensuring test validity nor the factors that go into it. We went over the difficulty level and the discrimination index as well, but I was nodding off a little and decided to be sure that I looked over this later. Near the end of class we got into our content area groups to talk about project 2. I think we have a good group! We'll meet for the first time on Tuesday so we shall see how everything goes.