Reddit mentions: The best education assessment books

Congrats on getting hired!!! I'd recommend a mix of PD/teaching books and content. When you get bored of one switch to the other. Both are equally important (unless you feel stronger in one area than the other).

For PD, I'd recommend: Teach Like a Pirate, Blended, The Wild Card, and the classic Essential 55. Another one on grading is Fair Isn't Always Equal - this one really changed how I thought about grading in my classes.

As far as content, you have a couple ways to go - review an overview of history like Lies My Teacher Told Me, the classic People's History, or Teaching What Really Happened, or you can go with a really good book on a specific event or time period to make that unit really pop in the classroom. The Ron Chernow books on Hamilton, Washington, or Grant would be great (but long). I loved Undaunted Courage about Lewis & Clark and turned that into a really great lesson.

Have a great summer and best of luck next year!!

Some ideas:

I like using improv games in the classroom. They engage kids socially and force them to use English. You can find all kinds of games online but here is one list http://www.kidactivities.net/post/improv-games-and-exercises.aspx

Here is a website with ESL lesson plans. http://ielanguages.com/lessonplan.html It may be worth investing in a book to take with you (links on that site).

Speaking of books, you could also invest in a comprehension passage book. Every page has a reasonably interesting reading passage followed by comprehension questions. Can be a nice way to warm up or get a formative assessment of their progress. https://www.amazon.com/Comprehension-Skills-Short-Passages-Reading/dp/0545460530

Good luck and have fun! I am back teaching in the states these days but my time abroad was one of the best experiences of my life.

Also, not sure if this is appropriate, but I went to college to be a teacher. History, not English. I know my grammar and punctuation on the internet and in text messages is shit. I'm good. I didn't go to Harvard. All of my students have always shown improvement, not that their grades have all been so high as Harvard's by any means. One of my favorite books I like to share with people interested in education and the art of learning or teaching is What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? And Other Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies by Alfie Kohn. It takes a look at grades, testing and practices in an attempt to find flaws and improve them, making education better, and even cheaper, for all. Here's a shameless plug for it only because I absolutely insist people read it. We've all had some level of education and there's copies for less than a dollar. I'm not saying it's complete or a bible for educational standards I just think it makes a few good points and it's very interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Educated-Essays-Standards-Grading-Follies/dp/0807032670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416682959&sr=8-1&keywords=alfie+kohn+what+does+it+mean+to+be+well+educated

I don't think that Hattie's work faithfully represents the research. For example, let's go down the rabbit hole on his 'research' on class size.

The major paper that Hattie uses was by Glass and Smith from 1979. The results are graphed here: https://i.imgur.com/Qrom8X7.png and here: https://i.imgur.com/xCGKy0P.png


The trend and difference between good and poor research are clearly displayed. Their conclusion:

> The curve for the well-controlled studies then, is probably the best representation of the class-size and achievement relationship...

> A clear and strong relationship between class size and achievement has emerged... There is little doubt, that other things being equal, more is learned in smaller classes.

Hattie stated that:

> Glass and Smith (1978) reported an average effect of 0.09 based on 77 studies...

Glass and Smith didn't report this at all. When contacted Professor Glass replied:

> Averaging class size reduction effects over a range of reductions makes no sense to me.

> It's the curve that counts.

> Reductions from 40 to 30 bring about negligible achievement effects. From 20 to 10 is a different story.

> But Teacher Workload and its relationship to class size is what counts in my book.

Other researchers in this field on this topic:

• '[Hattie computes averages that do not make any sense.] (https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/9475/7229)' - From a paper called "How to engage in pseudoscience with real data"
  
• Given the important influence these [Hattie & others] reports seem to be having in government and regional education policies, they need to be carefully scrutinised in order to be sure about the claims that are made
  
• The numerical summaries used to develop the toolkit (or the alternative ‘barometer of influences’: Hattie 2009) are not a measure of educational impact because larger numbers produced from this process are not indicative of larger educational impact. Instead, areas which rank highly in Marzano (1998), Hattie (2009) and Higgins et al. (2013) are those in which researchers can design more sensitive experiments. As such, using these ranked meta-meta-analyses to drive educational policy is misguided
  
• …right now meta‐analysis is simply not a suitable technique for summarizing the relative effectiveness of different approaches to improving student learning… - Prof Dylan Wiliam
  
  
  ... the list goes on and it goes on for every single topic.
  
  Oh, Glass and Smith invented meta-analysis as a research methodology and as such defined most of the protocols for its success.
  
  > The result of a meta-analysis should never be an average; it should be a graph. - Glass and Smith

Check out Hacking Assessment. That title along with a lot of other research I have been doing has convinced me that grades are an ineffective and dated way of measuring student success. It was a big eye-opener for me, and I have done the best I can to implement a grade-less framework in my own classroom. Has it been perfect this year? No. But I do believe that I am on to something wonderful.

These do not seem that different than many state standards. What do you see that is different with these?
At a high-level, lots of standards sound reasonable, but the whole notion of standards, especially ones like these that specify certain content/knowledge at certain ages ignore a lot of what is known about learning and child development. Additionally, these standards are largely driven by companies whose business is making textbooks and standardized tests. Even if the federal gov't doesn't mandate it, states will be compelled to adopt the latest tests, textbooks, and curriculum (to get RTTT funding or other political pressure. Moreover, such national standards move educational decision making further away from teachers and communities.
Here are a couple links to counterbalance the national standards view: here and here. Also check out the great book, One Size Fits Few

I think there are many simple ways to deal with it, to varying degrees of impact. Just taking the median rather than the average will be a step up, since extremes at both ends don't have outsize effects on the data. Or consider the students last few grades only. You can average them for an easy fix, or think about trajectory--is the most recent grade reflective of increasingly high grades and thus potentially valid, or is the data more erratic?

You're right--if they can ace it with no effort, why are you penalizing them for knowing it? This is a consistent problem with gifted children--they don't care about the busy work they're given, and then get penalized for being knowledegable.

Honestly though, grades are generally a pretty broken system and in the US they get used very inappropriately such as giving a kid a 0% for not putting their name on it, or even for not doing it (think: how does no data about their math work tell you that they can't do math? It has nothing to do with actually achievement of learning, which is what grades are allegedly for, and everything to do with work habits, which don't really involve math understanding). Grades also don't encourage learning--they see the letter or percent and then ignore all feedback.

The better solution to grading is feedback, and [rubrics] (https://smile.amazon.com/Create-Rubrics-Formative-Assessment-Grading/dp/1416615075/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1537924177&sr=8-1&keywords=grading+with+rubrics) help with that. But there are less "drastic" [changes] (https://smile.amazon.com/Repair-Kit-Grading-Assessment-2007-05-11/dp/B01JXQ1HGC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1537924255&sr=8-3&keywords=15+fixes+for+grading) that can be done as well.

Did you ever take a class in measurement and evaluation? If you'd like a solid resource to refer back to, this has been a pretty decent book so far and covers a lot of the things the others are talking about. You could probably find an earlier version for a hell of a lot cheaper, but so far (in my class) it's been pretty useful and not a stupid fluff-text. It talks about the purpose and use of different types of questions, stuff to avoid, etc. It has a whole chapter on selected-response questions, and another on constructed-response questions, and focuses on how to make assessments both valid and reliable.

Well I'm going into my first year of teaching and at the moment I'm on teacher practice. [This book] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1441138412/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=10YEMQ9U9SS0E&coliid=I3N8QH7DNAGGMG) would help me SO MUCH.
Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike
I hope your shift isn't too bad!

I actually don't put much weight on different learning styles, but I loved the forms in this book- I've used them for about 5 years. I've personally worked with the authors and they produce big data driven results.

They can be good indicators, but they shouldn't be the metric upon which your graduation is based.



When my wife was studying to be a teacher, she read two books about standardized testing, and one of them posed a very interesting question:

Consider, for a moment, what would happen if 100% of the students in a given district passed a standardized test. Would the school board say "Damn, we have some good teachers!"?

Nope. They'd say that the tests are too easy. So from the word "Go!" the tests are designed so that some people will fail them.

The books she read were:

Making the Grades (http://www.amazon.com/Making-Grades-Misadventures-Standardized-Industry/dp/098170915X)

What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (http://www.amazon.com/Happened-Recess-Children-Struggling-Kindergarten/dp/0071383263)

The first deals with standardized testing from the grader's perspective, and the second from the teachers perspective (which is where the above bit came from).

State testing is always a fun one - James Popham's The Truth About Testing explores how standardized testing has been misinterpreted by politicians and the media: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Testing-Educators-Action/dp/0871205238

WMU did a study about KIPP schools (https://www.edweek.org/media/kippstudy.pdf) and here is KIPP's response to the findings: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/04/kipps-response-to-western-michigan.html which would be interesting to discuss.

> It also has a tinge of contempt for political reporters--which is fair sometimes.

I have a significant amount of contempt for institutionalized White House reporters, and really a lot of the folks covering national politics in DC. It's a broken system that values maintaining access more than relaying the truth to the audience. It values balance and a false sense of festishized "objectivity" over the weight of facts and evidence.

There's three books I can recommend for a deeper level of criticism. One is Robert McChesney's "Our Unfree Press" which has an entire chapter on the brokenness of White House-based political reporting. It's a little more challenging of a read, as it is coming at the journalistic process from a heavy cultural/critical approach.

The other two are the two books I use when I teach our News Literacy course, which is a course all about teaching journalism students and non-journalism students alike how to be the best, most responsible, most critical consumers of news they can be. One is McManus's "Detecting Bull," and the other is Kovach and Rosenstiel's "Blur: How to know what's true in the age of information overload."

The former is a little more fun of a read, but it's also from 2012, so a lot of the examples are getting aged out.

https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Comprehension-Drastically-Improve-Skills-ebook/dp/B00HTY14DM This will drastically improve your reddit experience

Would you recommend Embedded Formative Assessment or the follow up Embedded Formative Assesment: Practical Techniques for the K-12 classroom?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1941112293/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=B94VD7VF7NTW2553JN94

I'm convinced the Finnish know what they're doing having read Smartest Kids in the World

The main reason I'm interested in the MS credential is to teach middle school core. I already have the book by Zarillo and I've used Teacherstestprep which has helped me in the past.

Read 'The Smartest Kids in the World', which provides some stories and data about the countries whose kids earn the highest marks as a group -- Korea & Finland.

The stories about Korea are frankly horrifying -- MOST families pay for after-school tutoring for up to eight hours. Your entire life, your family name, dependent on your high school final test, which determines your education, which determines your career potential.

Finland is completely different, but has a similar result -- very well educated young people.

could you tell us more about that? i've done that kind of grading in a not-online setting and kind of liked it.

http://realwaystoearnmoneyonline.com/2011/04/pearson-scoring-at-home.html

https://survey.vovici.com/se.ashx?s=058F3B575DC152AE

http://monthlyreview.org/2010/12/01/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-test-scorer

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Grades-Misadventures-Standardized-Industry/dp/098170915X

http://workathomemoms.about.com/od/education/tp/Scoring-Jobs-Online.htm

Consider what you mean by "the effectiveness of a multiple choice test". The educator is collecting evidence to support a claim about the understanding and skills of the student. A multiple choice test where answers could be potentially plugged in to solve the problem does not fully support the claim that the student has mastered a method for solving the problem without being given potential solutions. Professional judgement is required for interpretation.


In the classroom, a student's reasoning and skills should be evaluated in a variety of ways. For example, constructed response questions that require the student to explain each step in solving an equation or a project that requires a student to use their mathematical skills in a real life context could be used. These types of assessments are also imperfect because there is a degree of interpretation when assigning a grade.


All assessments have error, they are never perfect measures of a trait or skill.


Can a multiple choice question be written that accounts for your concern, yet evaluates whether a student has mastered this particular topic? Yes, the test could ask to solve two equations, and then have the students select the sum of the two solutions. Plugging in the answers would not help them solve that compound problem. However, this question is not perfect either because we are now evaluating whether they know what the word 'sum' means. This question also requires the student to be correct twice in a row, which could increase assessment error.


However, that is okay because, as I said above, all assessments have error, they are never perfect measures of a trait or skill.


Another factor to consider is that familiarity with multiple choice questions can be beneficial because that is the format of many standardized tests. Doing well on standardized is clearly not the end goal of education, but it is a reality.


Source: I flipped around in my Classroom Assessment textbook before writing this post: http://www.amazon.com/Classroom-Assessment-Principles-Standards-Based-Instruction/dp/0133119424

sigh I'm not going to post my works cited pages for you, but most of my information on this topic came from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Teacher-Evaluation-Right-Effectiveness/dp/0807754463

NMA's Science Bowl Practice Rounds - Volume II

And here's volume two!

What book are you using to study? A professor at my school wrote this: http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Revised-RICA-Preparation-Californias/dp/0137008686

I found it really helpful. Our reading classes were structured around it and I passed the RICA no problem.

STUDY THIS BOOK:
http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Revised-RICA-Preparation-Californias/dp/0137008686

Zarrillo.

SERIOUSLY.

Don't mess with quizlet- I found most of the questions/answers to be inaccurate.

Focus on case study examples.