WWTBAM Bored

We were one of the lucky schools to be randomly selected to give our students the National Assessment of Educational Progress this year. (It is commonly referred to as The Nations Report Card. This is the third time I have been involved with it in 14 years of being our school test coordinator. Actually, we do not even administer the test. NAEP officials come in and administer the test to make sure there is no possiblity of cheating. All our teachers will be in the room for is classroom management. It is sort of an odd test. There are just as many questions dealing with the student's home environment and study habits as there are subject area questions. Of course only subject area questions are considered when scoring the results but just as much time will be spent tomorrow answering those demographic type questions. Every teacher involved also had to fill out 30 page questionaire about their training and teaching practices.

The thing is that no school ever gets any sort of feedback on how they did on the test. The only score ever reported is the state-wide aggregrate total. That makes it harder to motivate students to really try hard. Once they find out that no one will ever know their score, the difficulty level of motivating them to give it their best goes up. We are making a stronger effort than in the past to motivate them for NAEP but it is a drop in the bucket compared to what we do later when the tests they are taking actually affect our accreditation ratings.

On top of all that, they had to go and schedule our test on Fat Tuesday. (No Mardi Gras for me )