Testing and Standards

Guillermo Solano-Flores appointed to board overseeing the Nation’s Report Card

Carrie Spector — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 03:37:33 +0000

Guillermo Solano-Flores appointed to board overseeing the Nation’s Report Card

Carrie Spector Thu, 10/12/2023 - 20:37

GSE Professor Guillermo Solano-Flores

Announcements | Education Policy | Testing and Standards

The GSE professor, an expert on testing and measurement, was named by the U.S. Secretary of Education to the National Assessment Governing Board.

October 13, 2023

Guillermo Solano-Flores, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), has been appointed to serve on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card, the only ongoing, nationally representative measure of student achievement in the United States.

“We are thrilled to welcome Guillermo to the governing board,” said Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board. “His important research has advanced assessment quality and educational opportunities, particularly for English learners, and he is deservedly a leader in the field of measurement.”

The National Assessment Governing Board was established by Congress in 1988 to oversee and set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card. NAEP provides information on student performance in various subjects and reports on student achievement across the nation, in states, and in select large urban districts.

Solano-Flores joins the nonpartisan, 26-member board as a testing and measurement expert. His research focuses on the intersection of assessment, cultural and linguistic diversity, and fairness, especially as it relates to the testing of U.S. students who are not proficient in English, students from different countries in the context of international comparisons, and students with disabilities. Current research projects examine academic language and testing, formative assessment practices for culturally diverse science classrooms, and the design and use of testing accommodations and accessibility resources for students with special needs in computer-administered tests.

He has served as a technical advisor to several assessment programs, including NAEP, and has been principal investigator in several National Science Foundation-funded projects examining the intersection of psychometrics, semiotics, and linguistics in testing. He is the author of the theory of test translation error, which addresses testing across cultures and languages.

“I’m confident the appointees announced today will draw on their diverse experiences — including as school leaders, educators, and parents — to guide decision-making around how we assess student achievement in our country,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “At this critical moment in our students’ continued recovery from the disruption of the pandemic, I’m especially grateful for these leaders and their willingness to serve on the National Assessment Governing Board.”

The National Assessment Governing Board decides what grades and subjects to assess, content to include, and achievement levels. It works with the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, to release and disseminate results.

Over the past year, NAEP has provided insights into student learning gaps across subjects and grades worsened by the pandemic. In addition, accompanying survey data has revealed important trends related to chronic absenteeism, literacy, and teacher confidence in getting students back on track.

This story was adapted from a press release issued by the National Assessment Governing Board.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Guillermo Solano-Flores

Does subtracting tests equal fair admissions?

Carrie Spector — Wed, 26 May 2021 20:56:41 +0000

Does subtracting tests equal fair admissions?

Carrie Spector Wed, 05/26/2021 - 13:56

Illustration: Colored Lights / Shutterstock

Higher Education | Race and Equity | Testing and Standards

Assistant Professor Ben Domingue and researcher AJ Alvero talk about their study showing a correlation between essay content and household income.

May 24, 2021

The Varsity Blues scandal triggered outrage about unfairness in college admissions, which goes far beyond the highly paid crimes of a few bad actors. For instance, SAT and ACT scores correlate strongly with wealth. That fact, plus COVID testing difficulties, has led more colleges to go test-optional, hoping to make admissions more fair.

But inequities, it turns out, won’t get fixed that easily. On this episode of School’s In, Ben Domingue, an assistant professor at �� Graduate School of Education, and doctoral student AJ Alvero join Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to discuss the researchers' analysis of 60,000 University of California undergraduate applications, which found that an essay’s vocabulary and punctuation reflect the writer’s household income. Even more so than SAT score, in fact.

“If you give me someone’s essay, we can predict the SAT score within about 120 points,” Alvero says.

It’s not clear how admissions departments used the essays in making decisions. But “whatever problem you have with the SAT, you’re likely to also [have] with the other features of the application packets,” Domingue says.

That means that simply eliminating standardized tests might not diversify the incoming college class.

“As colleges are interested in making changes to the way they do admissions, they need to be thinking carefully about how a reshuffling of the various components of the admissions package is going to lead to potentially new problems, and they also have an opportunity to really study the changes they make and ask whether these changes are yielding the results they want,” Domingue says. “I think we just need to go into this with our eyes open.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

In addition to Alvero and Domingue, coauthors of the research featured in this episode were Sonia Giebel, a doctoral student at ��; Ben Gebre-Medhin, a former postdoctoral student at �� and currently assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College; Anthony Lising Antonio, an associate professor of education at ��; and Mitchell L. Stevens, a professor of education at ��.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Benjamin Domingue , anthony lising antonio , Mitchell L. Stevens

Changing the way schools teach science

Dylan Conn — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 20:59:52 +0000

Changing the way schools teach science

Dylan Conn Wed, 06/26/2019 - 13:59

K-12 | Science and Math Education | Testing and Standards

Jonathan Osborne talks about how new K-12 standards were developed and shares ideas to get kids more excited about learning science.

June 8, 2019

Jonathan Osborne, professor emeritus of science education at �� Graduate School of Education, had a hand in many of the changes in the way kids learn science today. As an author of the Next Generation Science Standards for K-12 schools nationwide, the former science teacher and scientist sought to create guidelines based less on measuring what students know and more on encouraging them to analyze and interpret data, construct an explanation and argue from evidence.

“Fundamentally, in the end, science is about ideas, and they’re often difficult ideas,” says Osborne. “Even the idea that we live on a sphere rather than a flat plane—it’s very difficult to accept.”

On this episode of School’s In, Osborne talks to GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope about the process of developing new science standards for K-12 schools and how teachers and parents can help students meet them. He emphasizes the importance of making science fun and enjoyable for kids, which can come from experiences inside and outside of the classroom.

You can listen to School’s In on SiriusXM Insight channel 121, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Knowing previous students’ grades affects undergraduates’ GPA, �� scholars find

Brooke Donald Gorlick — Thu, 17 May 2018 18:47:13 +0000

Knowing previous students’ grades affects undergraduates’ GPA, �� scholars find

Brooke Donald … Thu, 05/17/2018 - 11:47

Data Science | Students | Testing and Standards

Students who used a course information platform to learn about the academic performance of previous students earned slightly lower grades.

May 10, 2018

By Alex Shashkevich

When undergraduates know how previous students performed in courses at their university, they end up receiving slightly lower class grades on average than they would have if they did not check out that information, according to �� research.

In a new research paper, an interdisciplinary group of �� scholars examined the effects of a course-planning web application which visualizes data from registrar records and prior student evaluations for each class. Through a randomized field experiment, the scholars found that the use of this platform led on average to a drop of 0.16 units in overall GPA. As an example, that decrease is large enough to move a B+ grade roughly half the distance to a B, the researchers said.

“The information students rely on to make academic decisions can have a demonstrable effect on their behavior,” said Mitchell Stevens, an associate professor at the �� Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the paper. “The design of academic environments, both digital and physical, really matters for student outcomes in college.”

The lowered scores were especially prominent among freshmen and sophomores, whose GPAs declined by 0.26. Juniors’ and seniors’ GPAs decreased only by 0.09 on average, according to the researchers.

The findings offer some of the first evidence of student behavior and academic performance being affected by exposure to this type of data, used more and more often in higher education as a way to help all students have equal access to information about courses and make more knowledgeable decisions about their academic schedules.

“This is a powerful insight for educators, because it suggests that the presentation of currently available institutional information can influence students’ academic behaviors,” the researchers write.

“The main takeaway here is that providing this type of information in a university environment can have a wide range of effects, some of which are unexpected. And we need to understand more about how students use some of this information,” said Ramesh Johari, associate professor of management science and engineering and the study co-author.

The new research paper is scheduled to be presented at the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale at the end of June. Tum Chaturapruek, a computer science doctoral candidate, is the lead author on the paper. Additional authors on the paper are Thomas Dee, a professor of education and director of the �� Center for Education Policy Analysis, and René Kizilcec, a researcher at the Graduate School of Education.

Behavior and information

Universities and colleges around the country are starting to provide students access to data to help them make decisions about the courses they take.

For this study, the researchers examined the impact of students’ use of Carta, a web-based course-planning tool developed by the researchers and made available to students as a voluntary resource to help them plan their courses. The students were divided into two groups: those who were encouraged to use Carta and those who weren’t.

The Carta platform provides course information, when available, including the distribution of prior students’ grades, percentage of students who dropped out and withdrew, average rating given by previous student evaluations and the number of hours per week students reported spending on the course, plus advice from past students to future students considering taking the class.

“Universities have a treasure trove of data on what students have done in the past, and this data can help students make better choices,” said Kizilcec, who is joining Cornell University as an assistant professor of information science in July. “One of the big questions is how to present this data so it could guide them rather than lead them astray.”

A concern some educators have expressed about showing students previous grades is that it could lead to students choosing what look like easier courses in order to get higher grades, resulting in grade inflation.

“However, the evidence from the study does not support the conclusion that students change their course portfolio to take easier courses after using Carta,” Chaturapruek said.

The researchers found that seeing prior grades had the biggest impact on GPA. But the researchers also found evidence that showing students solely how much time was spent on the course had a positive effect on GPA.

“The reality is much more complicated,” Johari said. “Students use this information in different ways, which we are just starting to try to understand.”

What might lead to the grade drop? The researchers found that the shift in GPA was tied to changes in students’ behavior within courses. The researchers hypothesize that the GPA changes are tied to students’ expectations about how hard their courses will be.

“Students start college with a lot of uncertainty about how hard their coursework is going to be. So when they see those grade distributions, which often show that a high percentage of students get A’s, they may invest a little less effort in their coursework,” Stevens offered as a plausible interpretation of the finding. “This is substantiated by the fact that the negative GPA change is strongest for first-year students during their first quarter.”

Beginning point for discussions

The new research paper is the first in a series of studies the researchers are conducting. They also hope to partner with other universities on future studies.

Further research is needed to figure out how the behavior of students changes exactly, the scholars said. In addition, the effects of similar information on student behavior may be different at other universities or colleges.

“This research is already creating many conversations, and there are great questions out there: What sort of information do students deserve to know? In what form should that information be presented?” Stevens said. “We hope to continue to contribute to these discussions and others with further studies.

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Testing and Standards

Guillermo Solano-Flores appointed to board overseeing the Nation’s Report Card

Does subtracting tests equal fair admissions?

Changing the way schools teach science

Knowing previous students’ grades affects undergraduates’ GPA, ������������ scholars find

Behavior and information

Beginning point for discussions

Knowing previous students’ grades affects undergraduates’ GPA, �� scholars find