Eclectic Technology

"In education discussions and articles, people (myself included) often say “achievement” when referring to test scores, or “student learning” when talking about changes in those scores. These words reflect implicit judgments to some degree (e.g., that the test scores actually measure learning or achievement)."

This article explores three "common terms or phrases" that are used when talking about test scores, that are not understood. This is a guide that will help you understand how certain terms are "used or misused" in the area of standardized testing.

When people talk about open educational resources (OER) they often state that the use of OER will save money. In this study "20 middle and high school science teachers...adopted open textbooks to understand the process and determine the overall costs of such an adoption."

The conclusion states:

"Simply substituting open textbooks for traditional textbooks did not appear to have an effect on student test scores...One area of particular interest is the teachers whose classes saw relatively large (23% and 14%) increases in their CRT scores after adopting open textbooks. One of these teachers said, “The better students write in their textbooks more.” If this comment turns out to be representative of a broader phenomenon, we hypothesize that student test scores will improve when professional development is provided to teachers to help them understand the new activities and pedagogies made possible by the open textbooks (e.g., students highlighting and taking notes directly in their books)."

Additional information may be found in the article.

A new study suggests that 2.5 million laptops deployed in classrooms across 42 countries don't have any effect on academic performance.

This article raises some important questions, but no where did I see a discussion about the teacher and the implementation within the classroom...food for thought.