Comment by ryuhhnn

Comment by ryuhhnn 18 hours ago

Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material?

One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.

kelnos 6 hours ago

That also depends on how the tests work. If each test covers both the new material since the previous test, as well as older material, then that would require students retain all the material, not just the recent stuff.

Or maybe the last test of the semester covers the entire semester's material, while the earlier tests only cover new material since the previous test.

We can't say for sure without this information.

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MangoToupe 10 hours ago

I still don't see where you're pulling the "more likely" from.

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johnnyanmac 15 hours ago

A good student would do well regardless, a bad student would do bad regardless. Cell phones might help a bad student do a little less bad, but only a little.

For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.

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ryuhhnn 14 hours ago

> if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives
The thing I find interesting is that when most people talk about standardised tests, they are talking about assessments that benchmark how much trivial knowledge about a given subject one has, and this has been the standard for most of the history of the American education system. I would argue that this is a flawed way to measure a student's literacy–in any subject for that matter.
I would actually frame "learn and forget" as "learn and adapt" because I would much rather a student forget a piece of trivial knowledge, but still have the ability to figure it out on their own with the right resources than a student who can tell you the colour Benjamin Franklin wore on his 15th birthday, but couldn't explain the effects of imperialism on societies.
For much of history, we have incentivised rote memorisation of trivial knowledge and accidentally de-valued critical thinking and problem solving skills. Do you remember the backlash that schools got from _parents_ when schools started implementing Common Core in an attempt to get students to think more abstractly? While I scoff at them, I genuinely don't blame parents for coming to the conclusion that we should just do math "the way we used to do it", but I can't help but point out that this is leading to the exact decline in general literacy that we have seen in public schools over the years. Now when you start comparing the educational attainment of students in public schools vs. private schools this becomes a who other conversation that cell phones can't even begin to explain.

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