''When you compare the tenacity of 11th-graders taking the SAT and the PSSA, it's not even close,'' Villani (Tony Villani, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Bethlehem Area School District) said at a Curriculum Committee meeting.This was in response to the District's 11th grade scores resulting in a drop of the district to a ''corrective action 1'' status. The District is looking at ways to encourage students to take the tests more seriously.
Now assessing the level of seriousness may be difficult, it seems across the board in every set of scores I looked at the 11th grade had a marked drop-off from lower grades. Elementary was highest, 11th grade lowest, observationally.
Also quoted was the student board representative who supported Villani's statement:
admitted her fellow honors students do not take the PSSA seriously. She said she has watched her friends doodle on the test and fill in random answers.Bethlehem is looking at mandatory tutoring for all students who fall below proficient and other measures that would result in a student not receiving a diploma if an effort is not demonstrated to become proficient.
In short, incentivization is being sought. What makes a high school student (or middle school for that matter) care about a test that doesn't impact their grades or their ability to get into college? It would seem making it count in some way is the answer. Maybe, and I don't know if this is 'legal', a course grade could be applied no different than algebra or any other subject. Impacting a student's GPA would probably encourage higher scores or at least taking the test more seriously.
Is the decline at 11th grade an absolute causation or merely a correlation with students level of interest in the test? Is there something else at play? It seems reasonsable to me. What do you think? Should Nazareth look for ways to tie the PSSA scores to GPA to encourage students to take the tests more seriously than they do now? Or do students take them seriously and there is some other factor out there that needs to be addressed?
1 comment:
This is absolutely correct: students don't take the PSSAs seriously. This is partly because it doesn't actually affect them in any way, certainly, but there are other reasons as well. The moment that made me realize that the PSSAs were absolutely worthless actually occurred when I got my 11th grade scores, so it didn't affect how I did on the tests, but the same may not be true for others.
After completing one of the writing assignments, I realized that I was very proud of what I had just written, and that I wanted a copy of it. I asked how I could get one, and my teacher basically told me, "Good luck with that." The next day, I finished my writing assignment in one-third of the time alotted, and spent the rest of the time copying out the previous day's assignment word-for-word.
When I got my scores, I found that the grades for the second day's assignment were substantially higher than those for the first day's assignment. Since I knew for a fact that the quality of the second assignment was much, much lower, I first got really angry, and then stopped caring. It's entirely possible that similar moments happened for other students earlier in their academic careers.
Post a Comment