Skip to main content

STAR Readers - ST Week 3.2

I am a firm believer that learning never ends, and as a future educator, I aim to support the continuous growth and development of my students’ knowledge and skills by providing them with multiple opportunities for formative assessment and revision before any summative demonstrations of learning. Unfortunately, not all mandated assessments for students attending schools in the United States offer the same sort of “test, reflect, revise, and repeat” cycle that nurtures continuous learning in the same way that I strive to do in my unit planning. From my own experiences, Massachusetts’s MCAS testing was a high stakes exam for my teachers, but students also felt the pressure to meet statewide curriculum and performance goals. The value of standardized testing is a hot debate topic among educators, and while the progressivist teacher in me tends to stand against standardized testing (after all, standardized tests focus on state statistics and curriculum in a way that reduces the centrality of the student), I was highly impressed with how Mr. J employed Vermont’s STAR Reading exam in his classroom.




Last Thursday, Team Nova’s eighth graders completed the STAR Reading exam, an online reading test that gathers various literacy statistics for participating students (approximate Lexile levels, grade levels for reading, how students compare to their peers and school community, etc.). Students take the exam anywhere between 3 and 5 times a year as a means to measure their progress as independent readers. While a lot of our students scored in the eighth grade target areas for the STAR, some results were pleasantly surprising, and others came as a bit of a shock. Expecting the score to be a “one and done” deal like most standardized tests I have taken in the past, I was elated to learn that students who scored lower than Mr. J had predicted would be offered a second opportunity to take the STAR. Tuesday, students completed a second round of STAR testing if their scores were below what Mr. J truly believed their capabilities were. The results were far better than Thursday’s exam scores: most second round students scored at or above their target areas compared to their September scores.

There are about a million thoughts that come to mind when I ponder the STAR exam and standardized testing. For starters, and parallel to my last post about “the Fridays,” how much does the time of day/week impact student performance on standardized tests? I know I will have little control over when certain tests are given, but will I have opportunities to advocate for students who may benefit from testing on a certain day or at a certain time? Next, does repeating the STAR exam technically skew the literacy data for our classroom? Student data uses the best scores on the STAR exam(s) taken within a certain timeframe, so while each student is only accounted for once, taking one student’s better scores compared to another’s single score seems like equitable testing could get lost in translation. Where do you draw the line for who qualifies to retest? What about students whose scores are thought to reflect a “bad” day? Students will have days where some material is more difficult to digest than on others, no matter the subject area or task assigned in class. Should student data really be based on a “better” day set of test scores? What, then, defines true student capabilities?

While I walk the line between agreeing and disagreeing with my students retaking the STAR, I am positive that I support the idea of students being given the opportunity to learn from their past experiences in order to revise for the future. With new “What I Need”/ intervention groups forming based on our new STAR data this week, I look forward to seeing how well students grow in their humanities, science, or math skills over the course of their third term WIN placements.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching Alternatives: Book Reports

As a part of my elementary school's annual community-building program, students in all grades (which, for us, meant Kindergarten through 5th Grade) were asked to read the same short novel at home. Now, I know that sounds odd, considering the average kindergartener is likely at a lower reading level than the average fifth grader. However, with the option to have your parent or guardian read the story with you at home, I assure you that I was able to make it through some higher level reading with little trouble. By participating in year-round activities as a whole school, students were able to relate to each other across grade levels, all because they had read the same book and had followed the same characters. I will never forget how excited I was when I won a dictionary (Yes, a dictionary... I'd be less excited now, too) for answering the most trivia questions correctly about The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs . Though, if I had one complaint about the school- wide...
1 comment
Read more

Place-Based Learning: Museums and the Importance of Physical Space in Middle School Education

Before there were formalized schools, there were living rooms, church halls, back steps, battlefields, and the great outdoors. Education came in all shapes and sizes, from the modern understanding of “traditional” study through the analysis of past writings and artifacts to the natural signals one learned to recognize on the farm before an approaching storm. Students were not just young people hunched over a book shielded from the world behind brick walls. They were citizens learning how to manage a family business, reading and printing newspapers, planting seeds, plowing land, and striving to better prepare themselves for the future, whatever it held for them. Today’s students aim to do the same. Yet their education seems to have restricted itself to the boundaries of school property, or perhaps it occasionally wanders beyond county lines. What happened to learning about your environment— and all the life that lived and lives within it— by experiencing everything it has to offer fir...
7 comments
Read more

Troublemakers, by Carla Shalaby

Out of any word in the English language, I think I am most intimidated by “power.” It is full of contradictions: Power provokes a sense of accomplishment while implying the achievement and maintenance of power requires competition, hierarchy, and domination. Power is given and taken easily, and it yields to external factors beyond its control. Some people fear power, others are generous with it, and still more meet their doom when pride becomes its companion. Power allows for advancement. It provides a sense of order and control, but it can also create and fuel chaos. Individuals, groups, small islands, and large nations all possess a certain degree of power. As a future educator, the environment of my classroom will depend entirely on how I and my students handle the power we are given in our teacher-student relationships. More importantly, my power as a potential change-maker in their lives— through traditional lessons, personal relationships, worldly guidance, and honest compassion...
4 comments
Read more