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What’s the point of assessment, anyway?

students taking a test in a classroom

As we reach the end of the first month of school, many students are facing their first test of the year. This can be nerve-wracking: a new set of instructor expectations, unfamiliar material, and potentially high stakes. All of this raises a question: what’s the point of assessment, anyway? The rhetoric around standardized testing would have you believe that there […]

Why the turnaround on the Common Core?

Bubble sheet with pencil filling in answers.

Although the standardized tests are months away, students, parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians are already mired in debate over the Common Core Standards (CCS). Websites are popping up to help teachers find and adjust to new lesson plans, new standards, and new materials. While some teachers favor the new standards, others increasingly oppose them, as do education luminaries like Diane Ravitch. But regardless of your stance on their efficacy, […]

Where are the humanities going, where have they been?

The debate over the place of the humanities in the modern curriculum continues without any sign of resolution. We’ve seen lamentations for the death of the humanities a call for the elimination of popular programs (like business schools) to save the humanities; a rebuttal that the humanities are alive and well😉 and that uncertain savior, the hybrid discipline of Digital Humanities. And this is only a small selection of available topics. And yet there’s more […]

Tried and true? The new face of assessment

US educators increasingly recognize that students have differing needs and goals for education. The most controversial may be compentency-based learning, which offers instruction and credits based on skill, rather than on time spent in the classroom. Several companies are capitalizing on this idea to offer new means of assessment. Among the most popular is the portfolio assessment, which allows […]

New standardized tests will change this year’s instruction

students writing an exam

It’s the start of a new school year, and that means that everyone — from students to parents to teachers to administrators — is worried about standardized testing. For some, it may mean jobs or admission. Whatever the source of anxiety is, one thing seems certain: test scores in the US are probably going to go down. This year marks the rollout of the Common-Core aligned […]

Career education starting earlier

A major reference point for many educational writers is the 1950s. In the US, this was an era when you didn’t need any education after high-school: with strong unions and the post-wat manufacturing boom, many men went to work in trades, while women either stayed home or worked in nursing, schools, or offices (think Mad […]

Plagiarism, Paper Mills, and Student Success

Desk with binders showing copy and original texts

Plagiarism is getting a lot of attention lately. From professors at Brown and Arizona State universities to politicians in Montana and Germany, a school board official in Toronto, and even a textbook writer on plagiarism, it seems like no one can keep track of their notes, words, or even ideas anymore. We are not Turnitin, and I’m not going to lecture about the importance of quotation marks, the […]

Sinking, swimming, treading water

teacher at chalkboard writing

One of the more controversial books on higher ed released in the 21st century was Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift. The researchers studied a cohort of students at 24 different schools in the US in a variety of ways: through questionnaires, standardized testing, and transcripts. The results were, to put it bluntly, depressing: as far as the […]

PISA scores and “tiger mothers”

Student completing work on a laptop

We’ve received comments from readers before about the PISA: how it isn’t an accurate test for judging differences between populations, how it’s a surprisingly good test for measuring change (or lack thereof) over time, how it shouldn’t be used to support cases for academic reform or teaching efficacy. Others have pointed out that low PISA scores don’t […]