more fun in Iowa

The fantastically good news from Christopher's ITBS test is that he scores in the top 5th percentile of the country on reading comprehension and vocabulary.

Knowing what I do now about the importance of reading comprehension to every single thing you ever do or attempt to do in life, that was incredibly good news.

I was deeply relieved. Relieved to the point of being euphoric, in fact.

That should give you a fair idea of the number our middle school manages to run on (some) parents' heads.

I am a distinctly non-panicking sort of person. I am a farmer, for god's sake. Until I hit this school I barely even registered the fact that my kid was taking standardized tests. I don't know what C's early test scores were. Also, I have no idea where I put the reports. This tells you just how much time and energy I've spent worrying about my child's comparative standing on norm-referenced achievement tests in the past.

My point being: for (some) parents, our middle school is the exact opposite of a happy, confidence-inspiring place.

It is an unhappy, panic-inspiring place.

After C's ELA score on the state test declined from a 4 to a 3, and his teacher told us that C. had scored average for his class, I was in a panic, especially given the the Darwinian gatekeeping that goes on around here.

Average doesn't cut it in Irvington.

Speaking of average, if average reading comprehension for C's class is the 95th percentile on the ITBS, I have no problem with C. being average for his class. Apart from the Darwinian gatekeeping thing, that is.^*

Actually, that's not quite correct.

The fact is, we know that at the end of 5th grade C. was not average for his class. He was in the top 10% of his class, which we know because approximately 10% of his class scored a 4 on the ELA test in the TONYSS and he was among them.

If after 5 months at the middle school he had suddenly become average for his class, that would be a problem no matter how high the average reading comprehension scores.

core principle:

decline is bad

The other problem with "average" is: what does average mean to the middle school?

Does it mean enforcing the bell curve?

We've been there for a year and a half now, and the core message re: student achievement seems to be:

your child
not the little genius you thought he was, eh?


Thanks to the ITBS, we're done with all that.

We have an objective measurement of C's standing vis a vis his peers in the United States.

His standing is high.

So we're done with "your child is the only one having a problem."

If a child scoring in the 95th percentile of the country in reading comprehension is having a problems -- a problem in any class, including math -- then A) he's not the only one, B) the school needs to fix it, and C) "fix it" does not mean moving him to an easier class.

update 2-22-2007: Or, if child's parents are ready to throw in the towel on this year's "accelerated" math class, it means school makes noises like, "We've looked at your child's scores and achievement; it would be doing him a disservice to drop him down to an easier course. What can we do to support his learning in the class he's in?"

It does not send an email saying, and I quote, "It looks like it is possible to put Christopher in Mr. P’s class this year. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee he will be placed in Math A next year unless Mr. P makes that recommendation."

__________________

^* I'm remembering the time Ms. U, then chair of the math department, told the Parent Uprising meeting that you could give her the best math students in the whole school and she could still eke out a bell curve. She said this with a striking air of authority and enthusiasm. Then, catching herself, she added, "Well, hopefully not the bottom part of the curve."

more fun with Iowa

Not only is Christopher better at fraction computation than whole number computation, he also scored better at solving multi-step problems than single-step.

Ed says the entire message of the ITBS scores is that across the board he's got good conceptual knowledge, so-so skills.

Which is pretty much the mission of his school.

Understanding without know-how!

That's the ticket!

The ITBS scores also clarify the limits of learning at home. I had an email the other day from a dad who said that most of the learning kids do happens at home, anyway, so what I should do is just focus on getting Christopher into classes with the best teachers and forget about the tracking & gatekeeping & politics.

I didn't have a succinct answer to that, apart from "He's not going to learn physics at home."

The succinct answer is that a child living with educated parents will acquire quite a lot of knowledge at home through incidental learning.

What he will not acquire is skills.

If your dad just so happens to be a historian, you can learn a lot about history talking to him about geography and history every night before bed. (Christopher scored in the 99th percentile on social studies.)

You can't learn how to do decimal computation rapidly and accurately by hanging out with your folks.

Nor can you learn how to punctuate a sentence.

So - workbooks!

Anyone know of a good punctuation workbook? (percentile rank: 68)

p.s. We are redoubling our efforts on spelling. (percentile rank: 64)

the Kitchen Table Math effect

Ever since I met Carolyn and all the Commenters here I've lived in mortal fear of deficient fraction knowledge in my child.

So that's his highest score on the three computation subscales.

Fractions.

He's better on fractions than he is on whole numbers.

Another revelation: he's pretty terrible on decimals.

sheesh

ITBS & math in Irvington

So.

First piece of potentially useful information to emerge from the ITBS.

I have a kid who is scoring in the top 12th percentile of the entire country in math, but the school can't guarantee him a seat in the accelerated math class come fall.

They can move him down.

Moving him down would be no problem.

They can print finds subject matter difficult on his report card.

They can tell us "Christopher is the only child having a problem."

These things they can do.

They cannot "guarantee" him a seat in the accelerated (that's accelerated, not "Honors") course come fall.

Eighty-eighth percentile.

We'll be discussing this with the district.

We won't just be talking about our child, either. Everyone else gets the same treatment. We have dozens of very bright kids who are easily capable of learning this material not learning this material because they've moved to the non-accelerated course.

The "accelerated" middle school math class has been structured and taught as a wash-out course.

This is the course that's supposed to separate the men from the mice.

Teacher was instructed by her superiors to "hold down the number of As."

It's time for the district to offer norm-referenced standardized testing to families who are interested.

Let's find out where Irvington kids stand compared to their peers in the rest of the country.

Then the district needs to explain to parents and taxpayers why kids scoring at the top of the country cannot take algebra in 8th grade in Irvington, NY.


still in the game

The ITBS scores were incredibly good news.

I'm saving the reading score for its own separate post; that's how good it was.

But the math scores were a cause for joy.

After all this....after being tracked out of algebra-in-the-8th-grade to begin with, after failing 1/3 of his course in fourth grade, after suffering through nearly two years in a supremely bad "accelerated" course....he is scoring in the top 12th percentile of the country.

In fact, he may be higher than that, because he scored quite low on "probability & statistics," I presume because he hadn't studied the topic when he took the test. (I had him take every sub-test.)

We can fix the computation score (75th percentile).

And we'll carry on working on his math education, with the goal of moving him as far into the 90s as possible.

I think we can do it.

We have friends - more than a few - whose kids reached high school with SAT math scores in the 500s. One of these kids scored nearly a perfect 800 on verbal; after months of SAT tutoring I think he only made it to the low 600s on math. Months of tutoring. By the time you reach junior year in high school, it's just too late.

On the SAT the 88th percentile is a score of 660. (pdf file)

The ITBS has a less selective test-taking population than the SAT. I don't know how to adjust for that statistically.

Still.

What these scores tell me is that he's still in the game.

That's good news.

Dan Willingham on overlearning

Practice Makes Perfect - But Only If You Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection

I've just found this link again for Samantha.

Question: Just how much should students practice what they learn? On the one hand, it seems obvious that practice is important. After all, "practice makes perfect." On the other hand, it seems just as obvious that practicing the same material again and again would be boring for students. How much practice is the right amount?

Answer: It is difficult to overstate the value of practice. For a new skill to become automatic or for new knowledge to become long-lasting, sustained practice, beyond the point of mastery, is necessary. This column summarizes why practice is so important and reviews the different effects of intense short-term practice versus sustained, long-term practice.

That students would benefit from practice might be deemed unsurprising. After all, doesn’t practice make perfect? The unexpected finding from cognitive science is that practice does not make perfect. Practice until you are perfect and you will be perfect only briefly. What’s necessary is sustained practice. By sustained practice I mean regular, ongoing review or use of the target material (e.g., regularly using new calculating skills to solve increasingly more complex math problems, reflecting on recently-learned historical material as one studies a subsequent history unit, taking regular quizzes or tests that draw on material learned earlier in the year). This kind of practice past the point of mastery is necessary to meet any of these three important goals of instruction: acquiring facts and knowledge, learning skills, or becoming an expert.

We've just come to this realization with Christopher: he is nowhere near "procedural fluency" with any kind of computation beyond his math facts.

Ed had been complaining that Christopher "doesn't know his math facts," which was ticking me off since I was there for many, many Saxon Fast Facts sheets; he certainly does know his math facts.

Turns out Ed doesn't know what the phrase "math facts" means; he was thinking "math facts" means "computation."

(question: Is this man living in the same house I'm living in?)

I had subliminally noticed that Christopher is too slow on computation, but of course I'm intensely focused on just getting him through the course in one piece. (I'm defining "one piece" as "grade goes back up to a B.") Also, I'm trying to write books.

So: blind spot.

Yesterday we got the ITBS results and - bingo. He's strong on everything in math except computation. (The computation test was hard. Lots of problems; very short time to work.)

math: 88th percentile
computation: 75th percentile

Eighty-eighth down to 75th: that seems like a huge difference to me.

Ed says when he works with Christopher he's still having to write out a division problem in order to divide a number by 2.

Obviously I let him drop out of KUMON way too soon.

I'm going to fix this problem with edhelper. (Susan & instructivist both like that site, iirc.) The KUMON sheets were too much, and were getting far too expensive since it's the same price every week no matter how many worksheets you do.


how to remember something forever

This is serendipity. I've found the passage I was searching for the other day:

Although practice takes on a different character for the longer-term, it is no less important. Studies show that if material is studied for one semester or one year, it will be retained adequately for perhaps a year after the last practice (Semb, Ellis, & Araujo, 1993), but most of it will be forgotten by the end of three or four years in the absence of further practice. If material is studied for three or four years, however, the learning may be retained for as long as 50 years after the last practice (Bahrick, 1984; Bahrick & Hall, 1991). There is some forgetting over the first five years, but after that, forgetting stops and the remainder will not be forgotten even if it is not practiced again. Researchers have examined a large number of variables that potentially could account for why research subjects forgot or failed to forget material, and they concluded that the key variable in very long-term memory was practice.*(see below *) Exactly what knowledge will be retained over the long-term has not been examined in detail, but it is reasonable to suppose that it is the material that overlaps multiple courses of study: Students who study American history for four years will retain the facts and themes that came up again and again in their history courses.

* It is likely relevant that there is not only more practice in this case, but that the practice is distributed across time rather than concentrated in a few months (see former column, "Allocating Student Study Time.")