Module 3: Beating the blue book blues

Bridging digital divides

Preface:

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Beating the blue book blues

...By the time Ms. Campeas has issued her decree, class [at George Washington High School]  has been in session for five minutes. I quickly distribute Kaplan workbooks to the students. I toss one Frisbee-style to a student whose corner desk is so thoroughly barricaded I cannot reach him. With a little sideways lurch, I wriggle between the groups of desks into the small hollow that seems to be the room’s dramatic center point. Students observe me quizzically (though some must look over their shoulders or turn around completely to do so). One rangy boy slumped heavily in his chair notices the Kaplan logo on the book, covers his face with long-fingered hands, and announces, “Not this again. Not Kaplan. I hate this shit.” Ms. Semidey stands between the science table and the chalkboard at the front of the room, a pair of scissors gripped tightly in her hand. Her Kaplan teacher’s manual lies unopened on the table before her. ...

—  "Tyranny of the test: One year as a Kaplan coach in the public schools"

By Jeremy Miller

The daily news deluge about standardized test score results, like the ones we talked about in our last class (here's some more blogs: Schools Matter and Education Notes Online), underscore the fact that knowing what our children know, even through "watered down" exams, fraudulent or not, are here to stay.  Today's classroom, once entirely dedicated to a chalkboard, posters, and students' arts & crafts, now must vie for space with multi-million dollar businesses like Kaplan and Princeton Review and politicians demanding "accountability."  All of the millions of dollars taken out of public education and put in the hands of private test bank businesses has barely budged the national assessments a blip. The result? New York does a poorer job at GED preparation than Mississippi.  Maybe that's why the DOE just dedicated $350 million to figuring out a new way to "improve the quality of assessment." A simple solution? Give teachers the technical training they need to design their own test banks, and keep all of those millions of dollars in the public schools where they belong.

And yet, for many first year teachers, assessing student mastery of content and skills delivered in class is often only an afterthought.  Understandably so, after wading through lesson plan writing, standards alignment, materials gathering and classroom management techniques – forget about the actual delivery of the lesson in a time and space pressured classroom container with scores of partially attentive children – teachers don't have a lot of energy left to do much of anything.  By the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas vacation, we just want to get the lessons over with, and collapse into blissful sleep, hopefully after, and not before, we can touch our beds. 

It took me years to figure out a simple truth about assessments: design them before you start writing your lesson plans.  If you know exactly what you intend to measure, before you start figuring out how you will deliver the content, you can streamline your lesson to focus on the techniques students will need to know to succeed with your assessment.  Many times young teachers don't manage time efficiently during delivery of their lessons, and then have to improvise an ad-hoc decision concerning what to cut out of the lesson, contemporaneous to delivering the lesson.  When facing this dilemma, many first year teachers will cut the most important part of the lesson, the summary, simply because, from a linear perspective, the summary is the last, and therefore least, important part of the lesson.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The summary is the first time a teacher gets feedback from the class, giving the teacher a sense of whether or not students "got the lesson."  Without this immediate feedback, it's likely that the teacher will move on to the next lesson on the next calendar day, not knowing whether students mastered yesterday's material.  And if you are one of those teachers who drop the summary, when do you think you will first get feedback on the success of your lesson? All too often, on a "high stakes" exam.  And if students didn't get it then, you are going to grade a lot of failing exams, and have to offer a lot of explanation to your students, their parents, your supervisors, their political bosses, indeed, the entire education matrix.

Module

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Deconstructing Regents

So how can we design simple assessments, for the summary of a lesson, aligned to state standards? In our city, it's all about the Regents, baby.  The best way to find Regents questions appropriate to your lesson plan is to go online to its archive and find the appropriate subject matter:

• ELA
• Math
• Social Studies
• Science

Unfortunately, Arts, Physical Education, Health, Family and Consumer Sciences, and Careers don't have Regents questions.  If you are designing an evaluation for those subjects, the best you can do is do a "teaching across curriculum" arabesque, and, from your lesson plan, associate a questions from one of the bulleted content areas to your lesson.

Let's say we wanted to create a Science Regents question for a Grade 4 lesson.  First, due to all of the political nonsense plaguing the most recent bunches of New York exams, go back to 2007, and look for the Rating Guide for that year's exam. Go to the next to last page of the document (page 17), and look at the item map that links each question in the test to relevant standards.

Let's say my lesson is aligned to Standard PS 5.1. Question 9 is appropriate for that standard. So let's download the Spring 2007 Grade 4 Science Regents Exam and create a question that we can save as a Word document.

Let's break Question 9 into the pieces we need to reproduce in order to provide our students with a "summary question" for our lesson.  There are four basic sections to a Regents question, the question stem, a graphic, text that follows the graphic, and an answer list.

It's very important to recreate Regents questions as accurately as possible.  Why?  Children are experts when it comes to non-verbal cues.  If you hurriedly scratch out an assessment question right before class, run it through the copier sideways so part of the right side is cut off, and then pass them out with an exasperated look on your face, do you think your students are going to take the question seriously?  On the other hand, if you hand them a carefully crafted question that has the look and feel of a Regents question, the odds are they're going to be a little more invested in getting the right answer, simply because "it's better to look good than to feel good."

There's another reason for taking the time to design a Regents-based question.  It's very easy to tweak a question you've already saved as a computer file and make several similar ones, with different answers.  This means that once you have a bunch of Regents questions created for a section unit taking up a week or two of classes, it's easy to create an 'A' and 'B' test, and hand out the 'A' tests to the odd numbered rows or tables, and the 'B' tests to the even numbered one.  Cheating in a class where half the class has one test, and the other a different one makes it next to impossible to copy answers.  Additionally, if you handwrite out a assessment question, what are you going to be doing next year, when you're teaching the same material?  Exactly the same thing, instead of simply tweaking your already prepared Regents questions.  An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of last-minute "wailing and flailing."

The goal of this module is to offer you the skills necessary to reproduce any Regents question you may find appropriate to your own summaries.  Making a bootleg, I am sorry to say, requires a lot of tech savvy.  I have looked far and wide for a cookbook recipe for minimizing the pain required to create your own testbank of Regents questions, aligned to your own personal lesson plans,  but alas, I have found none.  So all I can offer is my own bumbling, fumbling explanation of how create mad bootlegs of Regents questions.

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Testing 1, 2, 3...

Once you've identified a test question that you would like to reproduce, you first need to download the Regents exam, preferable to your memory stick or computer hard drive (so you can access the entire test whenever you want in the future) or to the desktop of whatever computer you are currently using.  I have downloaded every year's Regents exams going back to 2003, and have saved them in a special 'Regents' folder in my computer.  That way I can reproduce Regents questions, even if I'm not on the Internet.

Once you have downloaded the Regents file (File | Save Page As, or Ctrl-s), open it up independent of the Internet browser.  We will need to use the Adobe toolbar to get the job done.

Once you have opened up the Regents exam, scroll to the question you are interested in copying (Question #9) and follow this procedure.

1. Open up the test item template.
2. Go back to the Adobe file.
3. Make sure the text highlighter is enabled.  To make sure, click on the Tool Menu tab, click on the 'Select & Zoom' item, and click on the 'Select tool.'
   
   
4. Highlight the question section of the item by "clicking and dragging," that is, use the mouse to roll over screen to just to the left of the first letter (not the question number!) you want to copy, click and hold down the left mouse button, and while holding the left mouse button down, move the mouse to just to the right of the last letter you want to copy.
5. Once all of the text is highlighted, copy the text (Edit | Copy or Ctrl-c).
6. Go back to the test item template, and paste (Edit | Paste or Ctrl-v) the text into the document.
7. Hit the 'Enter' key.
8. Make sure the 'Format Paragraph' option is selected.
   
9. Delete any extra paragraphs '¶' in the question section. You should have two ¶ marks at the end of the question.
   
10. Save (File | Save or Ctrl-s) the Word file.  Make sure to give the Word file a name you can remember.
11. Go back to the Regents exam.  Now we are going to copy the graphic section.  To do so, we must first pick the 'Snapshot' selection tool.  Click on the Tool Menu tab, click on the 'Select & Zoom' item, and click on the 'Snapshot tool.'
    
    
12. "Lasso" the graphic by rolling over the the screen with the mouse until you are at the upper left corner of the graphic.  "Click and drag" until you are at the lower right corner of the graphic.  Let go of the left mouse button.  The graphic will automatically be copied.
13. Go back to the test item template, and paste (Edit | Paste or Ctrl-v) the test just to the left of the last ¶ marker. Make sure the graphic is on its own line.  If it's not, delete the graphic, hit the 'Enter' key, and paste the graphic again. 
14. Hit the 'Enter' key and save the Word file.
15. You may need to resize the graphic.  If you do, click once on the graphic so that its handles are visible. Hold down the Shift key.  Click and drag the bottom right handle until the graphic is the size you would like it to be. Let go of the mouse button.  Then, let go of the Shift key.
    
16. Go back to the Regents exam. Reselect the text highlighter (Step 3).  Copy and paste the text and answer sections into the test item template.  Save the Word file.

Now we are ready to format the Word document so that it looks like a Regents exam. Relax, we're almost done.

1. Select the question stem.  Click on the Question Mark button.
2. Select the graphic by moving the mouse cursor to the left of the graphic and clicking the left mouse button once.  Click on the Picture button.
3. Select the text section below the graphic.  Click on the Text button.
4. Select the answer section.  Click on the Answer button.
5. Save the test item document.
6. You're done!

If you're a stickler like me, you'll notice that the Elementary Regents exams use the New Century Schoolbook font. If you really want to make your assessments look like the Regents, you might want to invest $30 in buying the font.

Finally, New York isn't the only place to find assessment questions.  I have a wiki page that lists other states' sample assessments, as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam that's been creating such a bru ha ha of late.

Evaluation

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Homework #3

Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their aligned Standards to their group's wiki page.  

Deliverable #2: Each group will find one Regents question aligned with their standards.  Each group will copy, paste and format the Regents question in the test item template, as a Word document.

Deliverable #3: Each group will identify one NAEP question aligned with their standards.  Each group will identify one other state assessment question, from the wiki page, that is aligned with the lesson plan standards.


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