Learning by Making Rockets & Robots

[JohnBoucher]

Learning by Making
American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests.
A great article in Slate about how students are being educated.

[daniel_dsouza]

I wish our state would have the Maker Faire sometime (also when I'm not at school).

Arizona isn't a state too crazy about standardized tests, although I am always happy when I hear new team members saying how happy they are that they are here, and not obsessing over some test over the other (or at the Science Olympiad club, where the competition is primarily who can cram the most...)

Another good read would be The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids by Alexandra Robbins.

[suzumebachi]

Originally Posted by daniel_dsouza

(or at the Science Olympiad club, where the competition is primarily who can cram the most...)

I read this and laughed I'm in my school's SciOly team too, and that's basically how we roll

As much as I dislike standardized testing, honestly, what can you do? You really do need some way to measure stuff... And really, I don't believe in grades (you know, those letters and numbers that get on your transcript).. at least in my school they feel so meaningless since the teachers end up flooding everything with filler busy work so that everyone (it seems) can get A's.

[Astrokid248]

Ugh, Texas is the worst when it comes to standardized tests. We just switched to an even crazier system, and it's apparently an even more unbalanced system. So I agree completely this.

[Paul T.]

i go to Technical high school and still you see the standardized tests taking president over the education in the technical areas. i had a talk with a student in pluming about our standardized test, the MCAS, i took this test as he did and we both took the SAT's recently and the SAT's did not reflect what we experienced in the MCAS nor did either test judge our skills in the professions we would take part in the rest of our lives. he made a few valid points about how our school should be judged on how many students can pass the certifications in there given technical areas. so we logically thought the technical or vocational high schools should not judged on test scores but send there best students to a contest that measures skills.there is an organization that lets you compete in the technical areas at a district, state, national and world level. this organization is Skills USA and i think if technical high schools were judged on this it would be a more accurate gauge of progress in schools. this year i partook in the contest and at districts i was amazed from the test scores. at states the competition was hard and i was blown away with some of the skills my fellow students possessed. unfortunetly my team was the only one to win gold at states (in mechatronics) but using the data my school under preformed in every category but my own. this means we should really beef up the shop education right? wrong we scored good on MCAS and that seems to be where the focus is still currently at. with the states mind set my program should receive more money, we do need the funding but using the data about skills usa the rest of the school needs it more. flawed system?

[IKE]

What percentage of a students education do you believe should be spent learning hands on skills in High School? What would you cut? I see a lot of attacking of standardized tests, but why would schools put such an emphasis on "Standardized tests" if there wasn't some value for someone in those?

Often we push to incentives performance. In order to give out the incentives, we need a measure. Someone decides on the measure, and then incentives are tied to that measure. Folks that are good at "playing the game" may work to get the best incentive as opposed to the less measureable goals.

I think the focus on standardized testing is a resultant of this behaviour. There are several analogies that can be drawn to business. In bothe cases I think you can show short term improvements in the metrics and long term issues arising from an overfocus on those same metrics.

I would love to see more hands on experience, but I would caution folks to be careful about what you might take the place of.

[Siri]

I'm not a huge standardized test fan, and I agree that hands-on learning can be beneficial. However, I believe this article is fundamentally misrepresenting the situation it's critiquing.

First off, the sample is not a science question, it's a reading comprehension question. Fortunately, it's actually written so as to benefit both science-lovers who can use common sense to decipher the answer and readers who can simply read it. (Contrary to the article, you can easily know both the answer and the purpose of a microscope from reading Caution #4 and sentence 1, respectively.) Nor is there anything wrong with a 60% incorrect rate. Too little variance in correct-response rates makes it hard to students' actual levels and areas of growth. Scores are comparative.

Hands-on learning is certainly helpful in conjunction with theory. But as a substitute? The monkeys that typed Hamlet didn't actually learn iambic pentameter. The problem isn't chiefly one of testing students' grasp of theory, but of finding additional incentives for schools directed towards teaching problem solving and practical understanding.

But as IKE said, be careful what you replace. Standardized tests aren't perfect, and they can and are being improved. Educational policy on incentives is not perfect and similarly needs work. But nothing (except life) can test everything you need to know. But standardized exams certainly do test some of it. First 9 questions I randomly chose.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by IKE

What percentage of a students education do you believe should be spent learning hands on skills in High School? What would you cut? I see a lot of attacking of standardized tests, but why would schools put such an emphasis on "Standardized tests" if there wasn't some value for someone in those?

I would love to see more hands on experience, but I would caution folks to be careful about what you might take the place of.

Once upon a time a typical high school taught home economics and had a room full of Southbends and an auto shop, no? What got added when these classes were taken away? (Not a rhetorical question)

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

Once upon a time a typical high school taught home economics and had a room full of Southbends and an auto shop, no? What got added when these classes were taken away? (Not a rhetorical question)

At my school, the "vocational" classes got centralized between several schools. Students that were on a college prep course took course at the regular school. Students on the vocational track were required to take certain mandated courses during the morning (english, math, and history/government), but were then allowed to go to vocational in the afternoon. (Late 90s timeframe).

I have recently been in a handful of large schools that had auto & body shops at the schools that are all but closed down. Judging by the condition, I would say most of those closed around 2005-ish timeframe. Several FRC teams have taken over these spaces.

This is all anecdotal, but it would seem that the shop classes got the axe as more students moved to College Prep routes, and the funds got tighter.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by IKE

At my school, the "vocational" classes got centralized between several schools. Students that were on a college prep course took course at the regular school. Students on the vocational track were required to take certain mandated courses during the morning (english, math, and history/government), but were then allowed to go to vocational in the afternoon. (Late 90s timeframe).

I have recently been in a handful of large schools that had auto & body shops at the schools that are all but closed down. Judging by the condition, I would say most of those closed around 2005-ish timeframe. Several FRC teams have taken over these spaces.

This is all anecdotal, but it would seem that the shop classes got the axe as more students moved to College Prep routes, and the funds got tighter.

Interesting. Before I jumped ship to a magnet school my local high school had what was once clearly shop space but had since been converted to an art classroom. When my dad was in high school (early 80s) it had still been shop space. We too had a local vocational school, but they scheduled all of the vocational classes during the honors classes so it was impossible to do both. :rollseyes: We did still have middle school woodshop though. That was pretty cool. I'll never forget a bunch of kids didn't want to do one of the projects and Mr. Weatherbee said "Okay by me, but don't come complaining when you fail." -- they did the project. The voc school principal for most of my high school team's existence was really supportive as he thought FIRST was a great way to get honors kids into the voc school since he couldn't get them into regularly scheduled classes. Unfortunately his successor didn't feel the same way.

Maine actually uses the SAT test as their high school standardized testing. We also had to take a science supplement which was a joke. Over 80% of my high school class got a perfect score. I'm not sure AP tests are really a great standardized test either. I got a 5 on AP Calc BC and would not be surprised if I got more than 90% of the test right. I also got a 5 on AP Chemistry and would be very surprised if I got 50% of test correct.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

Maine actually uses the SAT test as their high school standardized testing. We also had to take a science supplement which was a joke. Over 80% of my high school class got a perfect score. I'm not sure AP tests are really a great standardized test either. I got a 5 on AP Calc BC and would not be surprised if I got more than 90% of the test right. I also got a 5 on AP Chemistry and would be very surprised if I got 50% of test correct.

I feel like this is one of the big misunderstandings with these types of tests (sorry, I don't meant to pick on you). It's not ~95% = A = 5, ~85% = B = 4. Yes, A =~ 5 and B =~ 4, but the percentages are (in the case of APs) based on the grades of students in college comparability studies. Depending on the test, your composite score could be 66% and still get a 5.

This is not to say that the scoring setting is necessarily done correctly in all standardized tests.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Siri

I feel like this is one of the big misunderstandings with these types of tests (sorry, I don't meant to pick on you). It's not ~95% = A = 5, ~85% = B = 4. Yes, A =~ 5 and B =~ 4, but the percentages are (in the case of APs) based on the grades of students in college comparability studies. Depending on the test, your composite score could be 66% and still get a 5.

This is not to say that the scoring setting is necessarily done correctly in all standardized tests.

Perhaps I am not smart enough to understand the College Board, but it seems like if you only need to get 50% of the test right to be as good as a college student getting an A you are losing a lot of resolution you could be using to separate students.

To expand on this a bit, I always tell my students about how the company I work for hires. We're a fairly large medical device company... but we contrary to popular assumption, we don't hire a lot of biomedical engineers. It's easier to hire a good mechanical, electrical, or computer engineer and teach him/her the biology they need for the job, than it is to teach a biomedical engineer the in-depth knowledge of a particular engineering discipline they need.

Absolutely. It seems to me that in most cases what you learn in school really just lays a broad base anyways. For example the project I spent 3 months working on when I was an intern got covered by the professor for about 2 minutes in my flight mechanics class.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

Perhaps I am not smart enough to understand the College Board, but it seems like if you only need to get 50% of the test right to be as good as a college student getting an A you are losing a lot of resolution you could be using to separate students

I won't speak for College Board, but I found a good description of their score setting process here. Perhaps it's because resolution can still be useful, even if it's not fed directly into the score?

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

Perhaps I am not smart enough to understand the College Board, but it seems like if you only need to get 50% of the test right to be as good as a college student getting an A you are losing a lot of resolution you could be using to separate students.

This is a misconception a lot of people have about testing.

If a large percentage of the population is getting 90% and multiple 100% socres, then THAT is where you are losing a lot of resolution. Saturation of data (in this case, 100% scores) means you're really not separating those at the top.

Many people believe the ideal test of subject knowledge should have the median score around 50%. Practically no one should get 100%. There should be a wide range of difficulty to the questions, from fairly easy to extremely difficult. By constructing a test this way, they hope to achieve the "characteristic of discrimination" in the test - which means the results should be able to separate the test takers along the entire spectrum of knowledge and understanding - not have everyone lumped into a tight band.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

This is a misconception a lot of people have about testing.

If a large percentage of the population is getting 90% and multiple 100% socres, then THAT is where you are losing a lot of resolution. Saturation of data (in this case, 100% scores) means you're really not separating those at the top.

Many people believe the ideal test of subject knowledge should have the median score around 50%. Practically no one should get 100%. There should be a wide range of difficulty to the questions, from fairly easy to extremely difficult. By constructing a test this way, they hope to achieve the "characteristic of discrimination" in the test - which means the results should be able to separate the test takers along the entire spectrum of knowledge and understanding - not have everyone lumped into a tight band.

So, what you are saying is that tests should not be used to evaluate absolute understanding but understanding relative to a peer group?