Evaluating Students

Evaluating Students

Introduction

I personally believe that educating children in public schools in the United States has been influenced by economic and fiscal policies, by political movements and systems, and by social systems and patterns. Prominently, today's competitive global economy calls for American education systems to prepare students to be successful in work, in life, and in the swiftly evolving, globalize world. Demographic, technological, social, and political changes have transformed the world into a diverse and multifaceted technology-driven place. Being successful in the global economy requires mastering knowledge and competencies, including basic academic skills such as mathematics and literacy, science skills, foreign language fluency, and critical thinking skills. This means that in order to survive in the world economy and the new information age, students must be equipped and empowered with the ability to access, interpret, analyze, and use information for making decisions (Linn, 1991). This global status has called for evaluating how well American schools are preparing students to succeed in the international marketplace of today's information-based society. Fundamentally, schools must ensure that all students have equal access to a quality education that will prepare them for success in the 21st century. This focus on student achievement has called for educational reform efforts based on defined learning outcomes and on linking assessment and accountability known as standards-based accountability. The requirement is that students of all racial and socioeconomic groups should graduate possessing the knowledge, motivation, and opportunity to participate fully in an expanding global and economic society. The challenge is to help all students learn at higher levels; accountability reform focuses on making judgments that until recently were difficult to make because academic standards were not clearly articulated and performance (proficiency) expectations were not defined.

Testing Students

According to my analysis and research, testing, also called assessment, is the procedures used to measure students on the education variables we are interested in. The purpose of a test is to assess students' aptitudes, achievements, knowledge, or skills. The result of testing is called the measurement. Generally, there are two separate testing strategies: criterion-referenced measurement and norm-referenced measurement. In norm-referenced tests, a student's performance is compared to the scores of a well-defined norm group of students who have previously taken the same test. The norm group has the same characteristics as the students in the study, such as age and grade level. Therefore, this kind of test is called norm-referenced because educators interpret a student's test score to the performance of the norm-group; emphasis is not on the absolute amount of performance, but on the relative position (called percentile rank) of the student compared to the norm group. Thus, students with a percentile rank of 50 on a norm-referenced test score higher than or equal to 50% of the group with which they are compared. In contrast, a criterion-referenced test is an absolute measurement because the score is interpreted by comparison to a standard or criterion (Eisner, 1999). The student's test performance can be interpreted according to the degree to which the domain has been ...