My manager called a meeting for all the teachers. She had arranged standardized testing for the past two months. This happened during class time, which means the teachers get to hang out while the students run through some multiple choice tests we didn’t need to prepare. I was told they were using the information to decide who was going to be advancing in levels for the next great syllabus realignment scheduled to happen next month. (About the time I go on vacation.)
It turns out, they had taken earlier tests that had also been tabulated. The goal was to show the students making progress month to month. It turns out 95% of our students did better on the second set of testing. My coworker and I waited till the director was out of the room, then searched the list for the names of students that had bombed and or stayed steady and wouldn’t be advancing with their classmates. One student did significantly worse, and a handful of students remained about the same. The student that bombed the test was one of my students.
She’s remarkable in the fact that no matter the help you give, she shows no signs of improvement. For example, today, during a dictation test, I wrote a difficult spelling word on the board for help. She still spelled it wrong every time. She has glasses, and was sitting in the first row. She’s just not very bright or doesn’t concentrate very hard. However, she is really nice to me and doesn’t annoy me, so I don’t mind. One of her classmates, and her best friend in the class, showed no progress despite being very bright for her age. I was shocked. This might be an affect of goofing around too much with her in class.
All the students I thought were going to bomb had shown modest improvements. Several students shocked me with their rapid advancement. There was very little in the way of a reliable predictor as to who was going to better.
Anyway, my director was very happy with the test results. We are doing something right! Pretty soon the students are either going to be getting perfect scored on the tests, or we’ll have to move up to the next difficulty across the board. Still, it’s good that we can pull out some tests now and again to prove the students are moving in the right direction.
