I have a grandson who started kindergarten this school year in a public school. He is one of about 20,000 students in the district. How can I become involved in his education in ways that will help him learn more, adjust to school life better, etc.? That is my question to myself. That is the first of the three subjects.
The other two subjects concern two studies and related documents in the very broad area of assessment. These are assessments OF learning related matters, not assessments FOR learning. (These OF-FOR classifications are thanks to Dr. Rick Stiggins an educational consultant and expert in assessment.)
The results of the first study are published under the title of: PISA 2006: Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World. The web site is at this link: http://www.pisa.oecd.org/ … Their principle report is available on the web and is down-loadable in 2 volumes of pdf files. Volume One is the narrative information with 390 pages and the Volume Two contains the data tables and has 319 pages. Both volumes are searchable (on-line or as a down-loaded file) using the comprehensive tables of contents or with Adobe 8. A related document, OECD Briefing Note for the United States, is 27 pages and compares, side by side, the key results for the US with global trends.
I have just scratched the surface of this report. But what is clear with only a moments looking is that the United States in general is in the middle of the pack of 57 countries participating in the study, yet 24.4% of the USA 15 year old students tested do not come up to minimum standards for science competency as determined by the testing organization.
The second study (and third subject of this post) is titled Parsing the Achievement Gap, published by the Educational Testing Service, ETS, in 2003. The author, Paul E. Barton of the ETS Policy Information Center, major factors outside the school that give rise the gaps in school achievement. He identifies 14 “Correlates of Achievement, and Gaps.” Six in the school and eight in what he calls “Before and Beyond School.”
The school factors are: Rigor of Curriculum, Teacher Preparation, Teacher Experience and Attendance, Class Size, Technology-Assisted Instruction, and School Safety.
The “Before and Beyond School” factors are: Parent Participation, Student Mobility, Birthweight, Lead Poisoning, Hunger and Nutrition, Reading to Young Children, Television Watching, and Parent Availability.
The emphasis of the data is on the “gaps in school achievement among racial and ethnic groups and between students from poor and non-poor families…” This is important information that should be in the hands of all teachers, administrators, parents, and law makers.
Student Mobility was a major factor in my schooling. I attended nine schools during my 12 years of grade school through high school. A classic symptom of this mobility is poor reading skills. I could barely read by the time I graduated from high school and headed to college. I’ll let you locate this report at: http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/5678_PERCReport_School.pdf … Read it and then see how you can act to improve things in your family and school district.
And what about my grandson? He and his younger brother need to be read to more often, and TV watching time needs to shrink. Fortunately for them the other family factors are not negatives.
