Reply to Why iReady is dangerous

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Why iReady is dangerous"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
To me, and I do not have incredibly strong feelings on the test and no ulterior motive, I think you underscore what some are saying is the problem. A child who got this wrong for picking an equation from the correct  fact family which is the strategy they used to get the correct result looks exactly the same oin results as a child who got this flat out wrong.That seems to obviously mean that children of very different abilities or deficiencies get lumped together. Hence that data is of questionable use/accuracy.[/quote]

My kids received problems like that [b]all of the time[/b] in regular FCPS worksheets and tests in first and second grade.  If they had chosen a member of the same fact family and not the one that directly translates the word problem, it would have been marked wrong.  I doubt any kids are confused about this, since they talk about this quite a bit in first and second grade.  There's nothing weird at all about the problem.

It also should be noted that the test is adaptive, and getting a problem wrong doesn't penalize you in the way you seem to think.  If the kid gets one wrong, an easier question is offered.  If the kid gets that one right, a harder problem is offered, and so on.  At the end of the test, the score is the "level" at which the kid is getting about half of the problems correct.  Unless a kid is repeatedly making mistakes, misunderstanding one problem here or there shouldn't make a difference in the final score.  Both of my kids tend to make careless mistakes.  They still both tested about where I would have expected them to be.

I'm not passionately pro-Iready.  I do think FCPS needed some sort of achievement and growth metric that is a little less subject to teacher bias or incompetence (like DRA).  Iready seems neither better nor worse than anything else out there.  If the people arguing against iready are just fundamentally opposed to standardized testing, that's a completely different argument.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics