I'm currently waiting to be called into serving on a jury of my peers. My peers consist of the woman? man? human? with a long braid, sitting in front of me, dressed like It's Pat from Saturday Night Live, snoring loudly enough to make several heads from the front of the room swivel round and stare; a man talking on a cellphone in Urdu (?) to someone I assume is hard of hearing, two woman kvelling about their talented offspring, while the others are playing around on their cell phones doing important things like scrolling down their screens with both thumbs like ambidextrous apes Since the internet access here is as fast as AOL was 15 years ago, I have plenty of time to multi-task*. I just finished reading my New Yorker magazine then started making more beat strips to upload to the blog, alternating with filling out report cards and pondering important life questions like, "Whose peers are these? and "Why data collection?"
At this time of year I am administering SLOs (student learning objectives test) to about 99 first graders, a process that takes me 2-3 weeks to complete because 1. part of the test has to administered individually, meaning that at any given time 99% of the class will be not directly supervised by me, and we all know that first graders are very good at finding quality activities to occupy their time when their teacher is not looking right at them. ( I tried giving the test in their classrooms and asking their teachers to leave them with some type of work but within 3 seconds of their teacher walking out the door, tiny hands shot up with VERY IMPORTANT issues like, "My pencil broke." "She/He's looking at me."or "I don't know what to do." Meanwhile, I'm sitting in the back trying to get a child to echo my singing, "So La WOULD YOU BE QUIET! Mi Mi." ) and 2. I have to hunt down the tons of absentees who come to school on the days that coincide with a full moon or high tide.
In the beginning of the year when we give the pre-test, we ask these first graders to bubble in the answers, which is in itself a crazy task. Most of the kids have the fine motor coordination of a goat with Parkinson's. That plus their .04 seconds attention span and you get children who tell you that they filled in their answer sheet to get pretty patterns. I decided to give this part individually after I saw that those students who weren't making pretty patterns were auditioning for clown college, studying their fingers or staring into the void. Also, many of the questions only had 2 answers, which means you really don't know if they chose an answer based on knowledge, guesswork or divine intervention.
I am opposed to data collection for this very reason. Tests that don't ask students to generate information, but instead rely on supplying the answer in a multiple guess format do not give you enough diagnostic information. If I hadn't interviewed my students as they took the test, I really would not know what they didn't know and why they didn't know it. I asked them to talk to me about why they chose an answer. I'm sure this is against all the laws of the land, but I need to know what my students know so I can teach them effectively. If they guessed the right answers then I would be teaching them based on unreliable data.
A few years ago I was trying to figure out why my students couldn't read notes on the staff. Many teachers, especially those who have lower performing students, struggle with this. I tried many, many different things until one day I pointed to the staff and asked, "Show me on you fingers how many lines you see." Two students held up six fingers. I could've told them they were wrong and continued, but I was puzzled and wanted to know how they arrived at their answer so I held my snarkiness in check and asked them how they came up with the number 6. One of the students came up to the board and pointed to the perpendicular line part of the treble staff. It struck me that 1. I hadn't asked the question correctly. I should've asked them how many horizontal lines they saw and 2. if I had given a test and asked, for example, what note was on the fifth line I would've gotten wrong answers but wouldn't have known WHY I had gotten wrong answers. We, teachers, need to know what the students are bringing to the table. Some of my kids are coming to the table with empty plates and if I ignore that and skip to dessert, they won't ever be satisfied
And that's what's wrong with data collection. It's based on tests that don't tell us what the students know, what the students don't know, and why the students do or don't know it. You can't post the data from interviewing students. But you sure do get a better idea of what's going on in their little heads. I would love to see this craze about data collection be put to rest so we can get back to the business of teaching and students the business of learning.
*day dream
