Marshall Memo 633
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
April 18, 2016
1. Five reasons not to use IQ tests – at all
2. How instructional coaches can build teachers’ trust
3. Grading less, learning from students, and giving better feedback
4. The potential and downsides of pre-assessments
5. Using Latin and Greek etymology to boost students’ ELA performance
6. A report on college and career preparation in U.S. high schools
7. The benefits of concentrating in one CTE area
8. Short item: An online database of science ideas and misconceptions
“Today, no reason exists to subject elementary-school pupils to IQ tests. All the reasons that once seemed so important have since proved to be invalid.”
Robert Sternberg (see item #1)
“Improvement [in writing] starts with volume. Volume suffers if I have to grade everything. Grading doesn’t make kids better. Volume, choice, and conferring makes kids better.”
Kelly Gallagher (see item #3)
“Give students daily opportunities to leave tracks of their thinking, use those tracks to notice patterns, and adjust instruction on the basis of what kids know and what they need. Repeat cycle.”
Chris Tovani (ibid.)
“Pre-assessment without associated action is like eating without digestion.”
Thomas Guskey and Jay McTighe (see item #4)
“High school should be about preparing young people for whatever future they choose for themselves. Right now, far too many graduates, especially those from low-[socioeconomic] backgrounds, have a diploma but no clear path forward.”
Sonja Brookins Santelises (see item #7)
In this article in School Administrator, Robert Sternberg (Cornell University) remembers how intimidated he was by the IQ tests he was given as an elementary school student in the late 1950s and early 1960s – and how badly he did. “Today, no reason exists to subject elementary-school pupils to IQ tests,” he says. “All the reasons that once seemed so important have since proved to be invalid… Education leaders can demonstrate their own intelligence by steering away from IQ tests.” Here are the previous rationales and Sternberg’s suggested alternatives:
• Old rationale #1: To identify a person’s true native ability – The idea was that IQ tests could find what a child was capable of irrespective of upbringing and social and cultural opportunities. So far, says Sternberg, all the ways we’ve tried to measure raw intelligence haven’t worked. Tests that contain questions on vocabulary, arithmetic, puzzle solving, and general information inevitably measure a person’s past social and cultural opportunities. Tests that use abstract geometric symbols produce results that are highly correlated with the amount of Western schooling a child has had. Tests that measure reaction time or brain functioning turn out to be unreliable. The bottom line, says Sternberg: “No existing IQ or other test can separate past opportunities from test performance.” In addition, New Zealand researcher James Flynn has found that over time, improvements in nutrition, medical care, technology, and schooling have produced a steady increase in IQ around the world – about 3 points every decade, or 30 points between 1900 and 2000. “The only reason the average IQ remained at 100,” says Sternberg, “is that test publishers kept renorming the tests, setting new expectations for what constituted a score at a certain level.”
The alternative, he suggests, is asking students questions in areas they’re interested in and know something about – for example, with Eskimo children, hunting, gathering, and fishing, with Kenyan schoolchildren, herbal medicines against malaria and other diseases. “If you understand the child’s knowledge and cognitive skills in a domain that is really meaningful to the child,” says Sternberg, “you will learn what the student is capable of doing in other domains, if only motivated to pursue those other domains.”
• Old rationale #2: To predict school achievement – Since past performance is often a good predictor of future performance and IQ tests contain material that students should have learned in previous grades, the idea was that IQ performance would tell us how well a child would perform down the road. But what if a student had mediocre or ineffective teachers in the grades just prior to an IQ test, or had a traumatic experience that affected motivation and performance? For these reasons (and also test anxiety), a one-time IQ assessment can be an inaccurate measure of a student’s potential for future success.
The alternative, says Sternberg, is to look at past achievement – course grades and achievement-test scores and take into account the context of those data. “This is why college admissions officers increasingly rely on high-school grades to predict college success,” he says.
• Old rationale #3: To identify students with learning disabilities – The idea was to compare a student’s IQ score with his or her achievement in reading, math, or another domain and look for discrepancies. This sounds reasonable, but it hasn’t worked well, says Sternberg: “The intelligence test inevitably measures verbal skills, whether in listening, reading, writing, or speaking – so you cannot cleanly separate out measurement of intelligence from measurement of reading (obviously, a verbal skill). The same holds for other content domains.” It turns out that students with a disability function about the same in their supposedly disabled domain as students who perform poorly for reasons unrelated to disability; IQ doesn’t matter.
The alternative, says Sternberg, is giving diagnostic assessments in specific areas, figuring out what needs to be improved, and working with students in those areas. “You don’t need the IQ test and never did,” he says. “If you want to know whether the deficit is domain-specific, just compare performance in that domain to performance in other domains. That’s all you really need.”
• Old rationale #4: To identify students for gifted programs – The idea was to select students who are truly smart, not just hard workers and high achievers. “But IQ and achievement tests all measure about the same thing,” says Sternberg. For example, results on SAT, ACT, and IQ tests are all highly correlated, even though the first two are supposed to be achievement tests. “You don’t need an IQ test to identify students for gifted programming,” he says.
The alternative is first to decide what you mean by “gifted.” If you say “high IQ,” you haven’t thought things through, says Sternberg. As Howard Gardner, Joseph Renzulli, David Feldman, and others have found, there’s a lot more to giftedness than what IQ tests measure. Performance-based assessments do a much better job – that is, looking at students’ actual work in the target area for giftedness – reading, math, science, art, music, and others.
• Old rationale #5: To draw comparisons of your students to those in other districts – “However you make comparisons across districts,” says Sternberg, “don’t use IQ tests. They won’t tell you want you want to know.” The alternative: use achievement tests.
“Thank You So Much for the Truth!” by Carla Finkelstein in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2016 (Vol. 97, #7, p. 19-24), www.kappanmagazine.org; Finkelstein is at [email protected].
(Originally titled “How I Learned to Be Strategic About Writing Comments”)
In this Educational Leadership article, high-school English teacher and consultant Cris Tovani bemoans the way her students used to ignore the comments she spent hours writing on their papers – and the fact that her comments didn’t seem to make a difference. Overhearing a conversation between two high-school athletic coaches, Tovani realized how differently their feedback was received and used by young players. “In a perfect world,” she thought, “teachers and students would work together toward a common goal, like athletes and coaches do. Students would care about the feedback we give them as much as we do.” This epiphany led Tovani to three conclusions:
(Originally titled “Pre-Assessment: Promises and Cautions”)
Why give students pre-assessments? ask Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) and Jay McTighe (author/consultant) in this Educational Leadership article. The most common reasons are:
In this article in Education Week, Laura Heitin reports on elementary schools that are teaching Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, and suffixes as part of their ELA curriculum. “A single root can generate over 100 words,” says Joanna Newton, a Virginia reading specialist. “It’s a paradigm shift in the way we teach vocabulary.” North Carolina grade 3-5 teacher Chris Schmidt is an enthusiast: “One of the lasting things the kids take from Caesar’s English is the fact that when you learn one stem you have some knowledge of countless words, and that hooks them.” Schmidt says that students’ attitude becomes, “This is something I’m trying to figure out. There’s a code in here, and I’m trying to break that code.” Ohio primary-grade teacher Diane MacBride spends two weeks on each root word. “Having conversations about words in 1st grade is huge,” she says. “It’s amazing to watch.” Her students take delight in finding root words in their independent reading and carrying their learning over to math class – for example, spotting that regrouping contains a Latin prefix.
All this is distinct from actually learning classical languages; it’s a utilitarian approach to giving students insights into the roots of their language. The Common Core ELA standards suggest teaching Latin roots starting in third grade – but also advocate thematic units that build background knowledge. Some teachers are trying to blend the two approaches by integrating classical root words into curriculum units.
Heitin reports on several classroom activities. One is teaching a root word each week and having students build lists of all the English words that use that root. Another exercise is showing students a list of words and challenging them to pick the “odd word out” – for example, precook, preheat, premixed, and pretest (it might be pretest, which doesn’t have to do with cooking, or premixed because it’s the only one with an –ed ending). Yet another approach is constructing nonsense words made up of Latin roots – for example, an unporter is a person who won’t carry in the groceries.
One challenge is when students come across false etymologies – for example, having learned that the prefix un- means not, students might think it applies to uncle, or having learned that temp means time as in temporary and contemporary, thinking it applies to temptation. In such cases, teachers might be as unsure as their students. “You don’t have to own all this knowledge,” says Newton, the Virginia specialist. “You can put ‘Words we want to know more about’ on the board and say, ‘Does anyone want to go home tonight and look up some of these words?’ We’re sharing that ambiguity with kids… That’s what real readers and thinkers do.”
“Can Latin Help Younger Students Build Vocabulary?” by Liana Heitin in Education Week, April 13, 2016 (Vol. 35, #27, p. 1, 14), www.edweek.org
In this Education Week article, Catherine Gewertz reports the findings of a new study from The Education Trust on the degree to which high-school courses prepare students for college and career success:
Too many students are “meandering toward graduation,” conclude Education Trust researchers Marni Bromberg and Christina Theokas. “High schools are prioritizing credit accrual, which treats graduation as the end goal. Instead of being prepared for college and career, many of our students turn out to have been prepared for neither.” The study makes the following recommendations:
“High-School Coursework Seen Falling Short” by Catherine Gewertz in Education Week, April 13, 2016 (Vol. 35, #27, p. 8), www.edweek.org
“Study: Tracking Not an Issue for Career-Tech-Education” by Catherine Gewertz in Education Week, April 13, 2016 (Vol. 35, #27, p. 6), www.edweek.org
An online database of science ideas and misconceptions – This American Association for the Advancement of Science website http://assessment.aaas.org/topics has key understandings, common misconceptions, and actual student performance in 16 areas of science knowledge, as well as quick quizzes to ferret out students’ misconceptions:
Life Science
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Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 44 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief
Better: Evidence-Based Education
Center for Performance Assessment Newsletter
District Administration
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
Essential Teacher
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Journal of Staff Development
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Literacy Today
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Perspectives
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Teacher
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children/Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The District Management Journal
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Principal/Learning System/Tools for Schools
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine
Wharton Leadership Digest