Comments on Growth in Achievement NCLB
- Author(s):
- Kane, Michael
- Publication Year:
- 2009
- Source:
- Paper presented at the Exploratory Seminar: Measurement Challenges Within the Race to the Top Agenda, Dec 2009
- Document Type:
- Paper
- Page Count:
- 9
- Subject/Key Words:
- K-12 Education, Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge, Growth Models, Educational Accountability, Learning Progression, Equating, Value-Added Model (VAM), Scaling, ETS K-12 Center
Abstract
Technical problems tend to become more tractable as we simplify our conception of what we want to measure, and so there is a tendency to focus on narrowly defined domains. Presumably, we do not really want to produce a generation of savants who know a lot of scientific detail but do not have a good sense of what science is all about, what it means to do an experiment, and how scientific principles play out in refrigerators and light bulbs, and in how to bake a cake. We want students, who generally start as novices in academic domains, to develop competence and/or expertise in these domains.