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Aug 22
2010
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Are high schools seriously misleading our students?Posted by: Dave Moursund Tagged in: Improving Education
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Click here to learn about Dave Moursund's free book on science and technology education for teaches and parents of K-8 children.
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An 8/18/2010 Wall Street Journal article available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703824304575435831555726858.html?KEYWORDS=high+school indicates:
“New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years.”
How can it be that so many college-oriented students take and pass courses that they are led to believe are preparing them for college, and yet not be prepared for college? Who are to blame, and what can be done to significantly improve this disastrous situation?
My feeling is that we are doing our students a terrible disservice. We should be making a considerably greater effort to help students understand the quality of precollege education that they are obtaining and how well it is preparing them for likely futures that they will encounter in their first few years after leaving high school.
Final Remarks
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Links to Related IAE Documents
Assessing Our Schooling System. Issue # 54 November 2010.
Being increasingly responsible for your own education.
Changing the world of education by failing more students.
Creating academic standards that that may be inappropriate and unattainable.
Student and adult desires for instant gratification and extrinsic motivation are significant roadblocks to improving education. Issue 24, August 2009.
Student assessment in the science and non-science of science and non-science courses.
Test anxiety and use of non-test methods to measure learning.
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written by Dave Moursund, September 11, 2010
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written by Dave Moursund, February 14, 2011
The article discusses raising the cut point for passing the Michigan Educational Assessment Program. Quoting from the article:
State educators are ready to raise the bar for students to earn passing scores on state exams, with leaders saying the move is intended to prepare students for college and careers.
But the leader of an education advocacy group says the state Board of Education is finally owning up to an ugly fact: Michigan students haven't been doing as well as advertised.
The state board today is expected to vote on an Education Department recommendation for steps to raise “cut scores,” the percentage of questions students must answer correctly to be deemed proficient on Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests.
Students can get as few as 40 percent correct on some tests and still meet the mark. The tests are used, in part, to meet federal No Child Left Behind testing goals. Schools that don't make their goals face a series of sanctions and improvement programs.
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Some my thoughts on this idea are available at http://iae-pedia.org/Empowerin..._Teachers. I believe the most important focus area should be on helping and encouraging students to take greater personal ownership in and responsibility for their own education. Students need to make more progress on self-assessment and they need to be provided with much better self-assessment tools.