Heres a piece from the NYTimes magazine on the overhaul of the S.A.T. and some of the factors that led up to the decision to re-make the standardized test. Personally, I found it riveting and cant wait to see what comes out of the national public debate over the changes. One change will have the standardized test measure knowledge of vocabulary in a new way. According to the article, The idea is that the test will emphasize words students should be encountering, like “synthesis,” which can have several meanings depending on their context. Instead of encouraging students to memorize flashcards, the test should promote the idea that they must read widely throughout their high-school years. Thats good, encourage students to read widely and deeply throughout high school. To quote the president of the College Board, David Coleman: “Whenever a question really matters in college or career, it is not enough just to give an answer,” Coleman said. “The crucial next step is to support your answer with evidence,” which allows insight into what the student actually knows. “And this change means a lot for the work students do to prepare for the exam. No longer will it be good enough to focus on tricks and trying to eliminate answer choices. We are not interested in students just picking an answer, but justifying their answers.” Here are three excerpts from the article (Sorry for so much text, but I think how this country educates its children, and then goes about measuring that learning, is an issue all of us should be interested in talking about, discussing and debating.): ******* A growing number of colleges and universities, frustrated by the minimal change to the SAT when it was revised in 2005 and motivated by a report issued in 2008 by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (Nacac), began to eliminate the SAT and its competitor, the A.C.T., as admission requirements, following the lead of several small, liberal-arts colleges that did so years before. The authors of the Nacac report cited a University of California study, which characterized the SAT as a “relatively poor predictor of student performance” and questioned the tendency of colleges to rely on the SAT as “one of the most important admission tools.” (Many of the schools that dropped test requirements saw spikes in their applications, at least in the first year.) Around the time the report came out — and following the publication of “The Power of Privilege,” by the Wake Forest University sociology professor Joseph A. Soares, an account of the way standardized tests contributed to discriminatory admissions policies at Yale — Wake Forest became the first highly rated institution (it regularly appears as a Top 30 university on the U.S. News & World Report college rankings) to announce a test-optional admissions policy. Follow-up studies at Wake Forest showed that the average high-school G.P.A. of incoming freshmen increased after the school stopped using standardized-test scores as a factor. Seventy-nine percent of its 2012 incoming class was in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes. Before going test-optional, that figure was in the low 60s. In addition, the school became less homogeneous. “The test highly correlates with family income,” says Soares, who also edited a book that, in part, examines the weak predictive validity of the SAT at the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and Wake Forest. “High-school grades do not.” He continued, “We have a lot more social, racial and lifestyle diversity. You see it on campus. Wake Forest was a little too much like a J. Crew catalog before we went test-optional.” A report released last month by William C. Hiss, a former dean of admissions at Bates College, and Valerie W. Franks, a former Bates assistant dean of admissions, supports Wake Forest’s experience. They reviewed 33 colleges and universities that did not require SAT or A.C.T. scores and found no significant difference in college G.P.A. or graduation rates between those who had submitted tests and those who had not. Specifically, they saw that students with good high-school grades did well in college, even if they had weak SAT scores. But students with weaker high-school grades — even with strong SATs — did less well in college. Those who didn’t submit SATs were more likely to be minority students, women, Pell grant recipients or the first in their families to go to college. ******* More than a year ago, Coleman and a team of College Board staff members and consultants began to try to do just that. Cyndie Schmeiser, the board’s chief of assessments, told me that their first order of business was to determine what the test should measure. Starting in late 2012 and continuing through the spring of 2013, she and her team had extensive conversations with students, teachers, parents, counselors, admissions officers and college instructors, asking each group to tell them in detail what they wanted from the test. What they arrived at above all was that a test should reflect the most important skills that were imparted by the best teachers. Schmeiser explained that, for example, a good instructor would teach Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by encouraging a conversation that involved analyzing the text and identifying the evidence, both factual and rhetorical, that makes it persuasive. “The opposite of what we’d want is a classroom where a teacher might ask only: ‘What was the year the speech was given? Where was it given?’ ” The team then set about trying to create test questions that lent themselves to this more meaningful engagement. Schmeiser said that in the past, assembling the SAT focused on making sure the questions performed on technical grounds, meaning: Were they appropriately easy or difficult among a wide range of students, and were they free of bias when tested across ethnic, racial and religious subgroups? The goal was “maximizing differentiation” among kids, which meant finding items that were answered correctly by those students who were expected to get them right and incorrectly by the weaker students. A simple way of achieving this, Coleman said, was to test the kind of obscure vocabulary words for which the SAT was famous (or infamous). The answer pattern was statistically strong, he said — a small percentage of the kids knew them, most did not — but it didn’t adequately reflect the educational values Coleman believed in. In redesigning the test, the College Board shifted its emphasis. It prioritized content, measuring each question against a set of specifications that reflect the kind of reading and math that students would encounter in college and their work lives. Schmeiser and others then spent much of early last year watching students as they answered a set of 20 or so problems, discussing the questions with the students afterward. “The predictive validity is going to come out the same,” she said of the redesigned test. “But in the new test, we have much more control over the content and skills that are being measured.” ****** But changing the test didn’t solve all the problems that preoccupied Coleman. He was still troubled by the inequalities in education opportunity and believed that the College Board should play a role in ameliorating them. For some time, the College Board had been aware of the work of Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Stanford, and Christopher Avery, a professor of public policy and management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who had been studying what is sometimes called undermatching — the tendency of poor students to pick a school that is closer to home and less rigorous, in spite of evidence that they could succeed elsewhere. Hoxby first became aware of the problem in 2004, when she was on the faculty at Harvard and the university announced to great fanfare that it would recruit top-performing, financially challenged kids by offering free tuition if their parents made less than $40,000. Yet despite the offer, enrollment numbers for those students remained stubbornly low. When Hoxby began to research the issue, she hypothesized that there was a large population of high-achieving, low-income students yet to be identified. She and Avery began working with the College Board and the A.C.T. to develop new techniques to find out how many students were in this low-income, top-performing pool and where they lived. By piecing together data from census reports, I.R.S. income data broken down by ZIP code, real estate valuations and other sources, they pinpointed some 35,000 students whose grades were in the top-10 percent nationally and whose family income was in the bottom quarter of families with a 12th-grader. When they tracked where those kids applied to school, they found a number that would later shock Coleman. Fifty-six percent didn’t apply to a single selective college or university. The researchers surmised this was a problem of communication, more than anything else; the information wasn’t reaching the students and families it needed to reach, and in the cases when it did, it wasn’t as clear and useful as it could be. Hoxby and Sarah Turner, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, tested whether they could change enrollment patterns. From 2010 to 2012, Hoxby’s team sent out personalized, detailed packets encouraging the high-achieving, low-income students to apply to several schools and providing application-fee waivers and financial-aid information about scholarships. In many cases these students would be able to see that they could get a better deal financially at more highly selective schools that wanted to attract them. The intervention resulted in those students’ applying to more colleges and closing “part of the college behavior ‘gap’ between low-income and high-income students with the same level of achievement,” Hoxby and Turner wrote. When Coleman became College Board president, he was briefed on the supporting role the board had played to date. He agreed with those who saw an opportunity and decided, he says, to “take it from a small experiment to implement it nationwide.” He called for additional research to find low-income students whom the board refers to as “college-ready,” meaning they scored 1,550 or above on the SAT (the top 43 percent of U.S. test-takers). Ultimately the board mailed out nearly 100,000 packets to top-performing and college-ready students. The packets included four or more application waivers to allow students to apply immediately to any of the more than 2,000 schools that agreed to participate in the program. One requirement of those colleges, Coleman said, was that they agreed to rely on the financial determination made by the College Board and didn’t make the students requalify for aid or special tuition dispensation. Instead, the waiver was designed to look like a ticket — “Here’s your ticket, go!” Coleman said — simplifying the process and encouraging the students to jump at the opportunity. Research on the initial effects of the program won’t be released until next month, but the speed with which the deployment happened fulfilled Coleman’s promise to accelerate the agenda. In January 2013, at a College Board-sponsored conference in Florida, Coleman met Daniel Porterfield, the president of Franklin & Marshall College, whose surprisingly effective work in bringing high-achieving, low-income students to his small liberal-arts school in Lancaster, Pa., gained national attention. Porterfield agreed with Hoxby’s team’s conclusions that the problem wasn’t that the students weren’t out there; the problem was that colleges weren’t looking hard enough to find them, and that this commitment was a big part of Franklin & Marshall’s success. Porterfield, who is now a board member of the College Board, told me he saw Coleman as uniquely “using the College Board to serve society as opposed to the College Board serving its own position.” He also said that when the two of them first talked, Coleman promised that the College Board could help F&M find talented, high-striving, high-achieving students and that he has “exactly delivered on that promise.”
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 20:10:11 +0000
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