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Florida Thinks Their Students Are Too Stupid To Know the Right Answers
gurps_npc writes "Robert Krampf, who runs the web site 'The Happy Scientist,' recently wrote in his blog about problems with Florida's Science FCAT. The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test is an attempt to measure how smart the students are. Where other states have teachers cheating to help students, Florida decided to grade correct answers as wrong. Mr. Krampf examined the state's science answers and found several that clearly listed right answers as wrong. One question had 3 out of 4 answers that were scientifically true. He wrote to the Florida Department of Education's Test Development center. They admitted he was right about the answers, but said they don't expect 5th graders to realize they were right. For this reason they marked them wrong. As such, they were not changing the tests. Note: they wouldn't let him examine real tests, just the practice tests given out. So we have no idea if FCAT is simply too lazy to provide good practice questions, or too stupid to be allowed to test our children."
Who's right doesn't matter, who has the power does!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
...educated.
I've been noticing stories that are covered much like this a lot on Slashdot lately. It's difficult to know whether it's journalism - which reports the facts and allows the reader to reach their own conclusion about them - an editorial piece - which is where blatantly opinion-laden writing is usually found - or tabloid reporting - which purports to be legitimate but is usually written for sensationalism.
I realize that proper journalism went out when political pundits were brought in, but this weird crossbreed of online reporting is becoming a trend.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
If you read TFA, you'll find that this isn't assuming that student's won't know something yet - it is defining a predator as an organism that gets its nutrients from consuming another organism (meaning a cow is a predictor).
And even if it was the first, consider the impact on anyone with an advanced-for-their-age understanding, and the impact on them. It knocks down their confidence in their budding intelligence, reduces to the least common denominator.
No, this is wrong in every way, and not defensible.
Check your premises.
Softness is a physical property you can test. Sweetness when it comes to aromas is a chemical response. And size vs bee attraction is also testable. What the question intends is which of these is most plausible when it comes to cause and effect which the right answer is 4. 1 and 3 are right due to the way the question was asked.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
There is no excuse. When there is a multiple choice question where only one choice is allowed, (like most standardized tests), all correct answers should be counted as correct. If there are answers that are correct for subtle reasons, either put alternate (more obvious) incorrect choices, or allow them as alternative correct answers.
No debate is necessary.
If we want good education for our kids (and thus, to maintain our position as an economic world power), there's two things that need be done.
First, hold teachers accountable. As you note, having the tenured gym teacher teach algebra because he can use a calculator must stop.
But the other bit is that we have to pay the true professionals what they're worth. Look at the teachers in the nations that lead on the test scores (Finland, Japan, etc) - they're not only highly respected, they're highly paid.
Check your premises.
The misconception this question enforces is stronger than that. 1 and 3 attempt compare the the measurement of physical properties while number 4 is a behavioural observation that can only be measured through correlation. Numbers 1 and 3 can be proven to be fact through measurement while number can only be a hypothesis(that can only be proven with a causation or disproven with a observation that states otherwise). From the TFA the purpose of the question is asses the student's ability to discern opinion/interpretation from a scientific observation. While number is undoubtedly a scientific observation, asserting number 4 is true after observation is still an opinion/interpretation, making it a poor choice to assert that student has a clear understanding of the difference between opinion and fact.
In multiple choice questions, the "most correct" answer is the right one. Otherwise, all answers can be correct, if you argue hard enough (if it's at all subjective).
The problem is, they used a stupid question - you can scientifically test the "softness" or "sweetness" of a flower. There should be one that's obviously "most correct".
For in-class quizzes, it's not so important (as the student can challenge it), but for a state-wide test there shouldn't be any wriggle room.
The response to his questions was pretty telling also. The official agreed with the science, that 3 of the answers were testable, but he said that students who learned about mineral hardness couldn't be expected to realize that applied to other materials, and that students couldn't be expected to realize that you can use a chromatograph (or anything else) to test the qualities of a smell.
The obvious solution is to choose other properties that are actually non-testable instead of list testable properties and assume the students won't know, but they refused to change those responses.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
When it was found that the British GCSE examiners were marking salt as something you couldn't melt, it was considered a national disaster and the media ripped the examining authorities a new one.
In Florida, marking something that scientists test everyday as untestable is more likely to get you a promotion and a hefty bonus.
Standardized exams are EVIL and worthless (exams should be tailored to as small a group as practical and should test that group's ability to acquire and understand knowledge, it's the only way you can establish anything of value) but standardized exams that are also factually wrong should be burned at the stake. There is no excuse for them. Ever.
It doesn't matter what the examiner "expects" the students to know. A "C" grade should be what you "expect" the students to know. "A" should be reserved for people who know things you DIDN'T expect them to know. If you run out of grade letters, as the UK's A-level group did when they added A* to the mix, then that's for people who know things you didn't even know yourself.
If you restrict people to boxes, expect them to have boxes for brains when they leave school. Maybe that works "just fine" in everglade country in the middle of a recession, but it should still not be acceptable. Anywhere. Ever.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'
Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'
I can understand the viewpoint given in the summary - how can a 5th grader possibly know the answer to such a challenging question? After all, are not all children ranked by their grade and set to be equal to their peers in that same approximately 1 year category? It defies their understanding of "abstract though begins at age x", and they forget that their is variance within that spectrum. There may be a child in 5th grade that understands advanced scientific topics, but since the probability of that is far, far lower than the probability of selecting the answer at random when given 1 of 4 or 1 of 5 choices, they have assumed the child just guessed.
However, there is something frightening about assessing the right answer as incorrect. Perhaps the testing needs to be redesigned to eliminate the ease at which randomly guessed right answers can be assessed. Unfortunately, scantrons are cheap ways of correcting thousands of tests - thus the write your answer and have a human correct will probably never be reimplemented. (Sorry for the ramblings - I'm cramming for a Linear Algebra midterm while slashdotting.)
In fairness, sometimes you have to teach a topic on which you are not an expert. My daughter was homeschooled for a few years (she's now about to graduate 12th grade at a magnet school) and I don't mind telling you, I had one hell of a time with biology, which I had skipped in school. (My school allowed you to take physics instead if you had already passed chemistry.) I wasn't even a chapter ahead of her; often I was only two or three pages ahead of her. (Geeze, biology is hard! I now have a profound respect for people in that field. As an engineer, I always thought of organisms as "really complicated machines". Now I think of organisms as "impossibly complicated machines".) And because I did not know the subject (as was the case with your teacher) I did not unquestioningly believe the textbook. If we found something questionable, we looked it up on the internet, found three or four sources, and saw if they agreed. (Not a sure thing, but better than having only one source.) We never found an actual error, although in a couple of cases I'd argue that some parts violated the "correlation is not causation" rule.
And then, we got into US History at her current school, and wow! Talk about logical fallacies! In reading the text to her, I'd have to stop every second paragraph and remark "those two things are actually unrelated". or "that's demonstrably untrue" or "that's a false dilemma". It was hard to get through the materials, find answers that passed the course, and still leave her critical thinking skills intact.
In summary, it's not necessarily how well the teacher knows the material, it's how well the teacher is engaged as a teacher.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not quite the same, but I've seen college exams where the professor had it wrong, marked me wrong, and would not fix the mistake.
One professor (computer graphics exam) thought the Sun behaved like a point light source on Earth. It does not, it behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth and the light arriving from the sun is for all computer graphics purposes arriving with the same vector direction. He would have none of it.
Humm, he wanted to treat the sun as a point source at 1 AU (93 million miles, 49,597,870.7 kilometres from wikipedia), while you wanted to treat it as a point source at infinite distance (thus generating plane waves)? Any "plane wave" like behaviour of sunlight is not because the sun is huge, but rather because the sun is far away. The larger the sun, the LESS its light behaves like a plane wave.
From a shadow casting point of view, both plane wave illumination and distant point source illumination result in sharp shadows, with very little to distinguish them. For a point sources at 1AU, the difference between angles on different sides of person-sized objects at for person-sized distances where the shadow is formed, is pretty minimal. To get a 1% increase in shadow size, you would need to have the shadow be 1% longer than the distance from the point source to the object casting the shadow, or about one million miles - which is probably not the type of thing you are trying to represent with your computer graphics.
I've never done any computer graphics involving scene lighting or anything like that, but I doubt the difference between point source and plane wave would be noticeable in modeling sunlight.
In actual fact, the sun is not a point source, it is an extended object about 1/2 of a degree in size, which means that shadows cast by sharp edges in sunlight have a "penumbra" of 0.5 degrees. Here is an image showing the formation of this type of shadow:
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/9/5239/F2.expansion.html
For a shadow cast on something a meter behind the object, using good old trig (1m) x tangent(0.5 degrees) = 0.00872686779 m or almost 9 mm. Thus sunlight shadows are fuzzy edges for real-world distances (albeit not really very fuzzy), compared to the sharp edges that plane waves or point sources would cast.
It may well be that the professor was "wrong" to model sunlight as a point source, but it seems at least as wrong to model it as a plane wave, when there is up to 1/2 of a degree in difference between different directions of the light from the source.
It's not about knowing which answers are accurate--it's about passing the test. Perceptive students learn very quickly how to provide the answers that are required, regardless of whether they are technically true or not. There is new about that--I learned it 40 years ago and scored much higher on standardized tests than I really deserved. It is utterly naïve to cast that in terms of recent politics.