Willingham also has a nice youtube video on merit pay and growth tests.
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> I would trust your sense of the gist, and it does sound like an article
> the existence of which I need to know, but probably one I need spend
> time on now. An anecdote my daughter passexd on from a neighbor whose
> daugher attends thrid-grade in a school in a fairly wealthy suburb. The
> daugher missed school one day from illness, and the day she went back to
> school phone her mother in a panic: they were having their math test
> (presumably one you refer to) that day. Her mother reassured her: Don 't
> worry; they're testing your teacher, not you. And it did turn out that
> that class had done nothing for three weeks but prepare for the test.
>
> Carrol
>
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>>
>> The gist of the article, dealing with the latest National Assessment
>> of Educational Progress (national reading and iirc also math tests) is
>> roughly this: reading appears to be improving at lower levels because
>> students are getting better earlier at decoding. But decoding is of
>> course not comprehension. Reading scores for high school students are
>> flat, and Willingham's point is that this is because their decoding
>> skills are already developed, but they are not getting the breadth of
>> content knowledge for better comprehension. Leaving aside questions
>> about the usefulness of the tests being used for the NAEP, it matters
>> because curricula have been focusing on (largely
>> non-domain-transferable) reading "skills" when what's really missing
>> is a broad (dare I call it "liberal"?) curriculum that give students
>> knowledge and experience that they can then use when they read.
>>
>> I reckon that's the nutshell.
>>
>> On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Did you read the article?
>> >
>> > No. I seldom if ever go to web sites. It's too painful and having them
>> > read aloud is (at least for some months) not mucyh better. It takes time
>> > to shift from a lifetime of taking in texts visually to take them in
>> > when read by an artificial voice (even when, as in ZoomText) it is a
>> > very good voice. So I would only look at a web source if the post itself
>> > was of such great interest as to make the source something that one had
>> > to know.
>> >
>> > Carrol
>> > ___________________________________
>> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>> >
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