Jeff for America

If there’s anything lacking at my school (and most) it’s not tests. In a 9 month period, my students take dozens of tests, including those from their teachers and those mandated by the state. There are four levels of testing that most students endure throughout the school year. Just for fun, I adapted the Homeland Security Advisory System to fit with the four levels of testing. With each level, the stakes become higher.

Schools have become so driven by these tests that the most important of them all (high stakes) takes only two days of the whole year, yet determine most of the curriculum, cost the most money and demand the most energy. In Pennsylvania, it is called the PSSA – and has already taken over the daily grind in most schools. PSSA this, PSSA that. In the end, each school is usually aware of their student’s progress to date and ability to perform well on the state test. They measure this throughout the year on various tests that attempt to mimic the PSSA in word choice and content. These are the predictive tests that are administered 4 + times throughout the school year.

This year, my school decided to order an external testing service to measure our in-house progress from September through the PSSA in April. Unfortunately, we went on the cheap and didn’t order anything more than the tests themselves. That meant no scantron, no grade sheet and a lot of time deciphering our student’s data. We were given the test booklets and instructions to fill out a two-sided grid for each of our classes. The grid (seen below) was confusing, manually entered, unarchivable, and ultimately useless.

By counting the number of X’s in each question column, the naked eye must decide which questions and skills the most students struggled with. It was an imperfect system that gave me little information about my students’ performance, and took up way too much time. Multiply that across my school of teachers, and we are putting in tens of hours of work into creating hand-written grids that are hard to read and impossible to integrate into our teaching.

So, with the help of my amazing roommate and friend Becca, I created this:

An electronic form of the grid, this spreadsheet format now gives us the ability to quickly and easily enter the data into the grid and instantly receive information about our students’ performance by breaking the questions into skills, color coding each question item for its total correct score, and providing a PSSA equivalent category for individual students. From here, you can create graphs of student performance by class, group (special education, for example) or grade. With a few clicks of the mouse, the information can be manipulated and turned into something useful. It took about 5 hours to put together, and without Becca – would have been far more primitive. But I did it – and the results have been amazing. I gave a short workshop session to all the teaching staff and now everyone is on board.

It has been one of my more tangible accomplishments this year – and something that really excited me. I like the feeling of creating something to make my school more efficient and my colleagues better teachers. Next year, I’ll be advising my school to purchase everything with the tests – not just the test books. And I really don’t mind that the testing scantron machine will make my electronic grid obsolete. I don’t really care how we do it, I just want us to use our data better.  If we’re gonna force these kids to take tests, the results better be damn useful.

- Jeff