Quote:
Originally Posted by KSig RC
Not to be outcome-oriented, but it seems like the very nature of the word 'test' means that the test determines "what you are supposed to teach" . . . however, I can agree that some tests are poorly designed.
This is inordinately vague, though - can I get a specific example?
Again, could I get an example? Basically, what you're saying here is that the response options are somehow poor choices to answer a given question? Or that the questions are phrased in a way that is not natural for examination of a given fact?
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I PMed you one example, but I'd invite anyone really interested to look at the any of the high school Georgia Performance Standards* (the curriculum) that can been found online and then to pull the End Of Course Test review guide for the same course, and look at the sample test questions. There's a bit of mystery to how one gets from one to the other.
To the second part: yes, both of the ideas you suggest are likely to happen, and sometimes, the "facts" tested might be considered wrong by people with a higher level of expertise.
As far as the first point, the tests aren't supposed to have replaced the curriculum, especially perhaps the local requirements added to the curriculum. Your job as a teacher probably depends most, if it depends on anything at all, on doing what the people in your building expect to see. If those expectations aren't related closely to the test, well, you can imagine that there's a problem.
*If you look and read them, you may want to think about how little of the curriculum would be measured by the SAT or ACT, and yet the schools are supposedly doing poorly because the kids don't do well on those tests.