You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Scores go up, scores go down”.
Scores go up, scores go down
Written by Todd Engdahl on Aug 10th, 2010. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
There should be little surprise at stagnant or declining writing skills. To begin with, there’s a growing vocabulary gap among elementary school students that’s being ignored by the educational establishment that’s primarily focused on testing rather than teaching comprehension and analysis skills, essential to writing skills. When I retired in 2000, several years after the beginning of CSAP, I had noticed for a few years that students were entering my accelerated geography classes lacking basic research skills such as finding information in the school library. Such skill development was apparently not being taught in favor of test taking skills. So-called “reformers” apparently believe that testing is a more effective measurement of student progress than research skills. If so, such thinking is not reform, rather adherence to the status quo, even regression to rote learning. This country cannot compete in the global economy with citizens who lack the higher order thinking skills necessary to produce the research and development of goods and services for the world market. Rote learning will produce a nation of worker bees capable of taking direction rather than conceptualizing and providing direction.
Is the grading of writing on the CSAP subjective? As noted above, ACT scores did not decline in writing. That combined with knowing one 8th grader that took early ACT and scored 34 on English but did not score at the top of CSAP in writing leads me to question the subjective scoring of the CSAP writing test and perhaps relevance of the prompts. I believe the ACT is a more accurate and useful measure of whether college bound students are prepared. Unfortunately the dip in writing scores, which may not indicate a true decline in writing, is distracting us from the national push to raise math and science achievemet. With nearly 7 out of 10 of our tenth graders non-proficient in math and knowing that the good jobs for our state and our students lay in STEM fields, we would be better served to focus on STEM subjects.