Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I am a former North American NTN Trivia champion. I played on a team, of course, the Inglewood Collective. Part of our success was due to our knowledge. But a big part of it was due to our ability to understand how to win trivia games. I remember one day winning a 'Raceway Trivia' game - despite knowing nothing about auto racing - by playing probabilities. This is, as educators have long pointed out (I read it first in Holt), what students learn in a lecture and test environment: how to pass the tests. So it should be no surprise to learn that schools, school boards, and now entire states are learning to game the system. "Many states have taken advantage of this autonomy to make their educational performance look much better than it really is." When the metric becomes reality, people work to make the metric look good, often at a cost to what the metric is purportedly measuring. Via Chris Correa.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 7:24 p.m.

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