Doug,
It seems that you are asking about using eToys as an assessment tool, and wondering about the ways in which your daughter is assessed at her school. First, your daughter can use eToys with you at home and maybe then take it to school and show the teacher. You could also direct the teacher to the squeakland.org site, which gives supporting evidence for using tools like Squeak as amplifiers of learning. Whether or not the school adopts eToys, it is a tool that she can easily use at home to make her own games and download projects. There are various forms of assessment defined by the educational community such as authentic assessment, performance based assessment, student led demonstrations, portfolios, or day to day assessment, all of which may include student eToy projects and other "big idea" exhibitions that demonstrate an understanding of the concepts and mastery of the skills of inquiry and expression. These kinds of demonstrations are not pencil and paper tests that show one right answer, but are big idea kinds of problems that require students to explain and expand their understanding. Of course, eToys projects, observing kids interactions with eToys, and big idea problems do give more assessment information. Part of school reform issues over the past from simply assessing a child's understandings based on right/wrong answers to a math test. It sounds like the math tests you are talking about really only assess computation skills, which is a small part of mathematics education. Teachers can usually easily ascertain whether a child's answer on that kind of test is a careless mistake or a complete lack of understanding. The best teaching practice would have the children analyze the mistakes they made in the test and then classify them as "careless mistake--I need to slow down and check", or "IDKY (I don't know (understand) YET)". Just the analysis of the mistake and figuring out whether one needs additional work with that concept is valuable learning. In my experience, it seems that children who are gifted in math seem to make more of those careless mistakes than the average math student. If your daughter is teaching the others in class who made the "top" math group, it seems that she should be allowed (or rather, encouraged), to demonstrate her understandings of the concepts in other ways. She might also need coaching in slowing down and checking her answers for the computation tests. In many schools, the move has been from testing to multiple assessment, from assessments of one or two dimensions to multidimensional assessment and from testing as an isolated activity to testing as a part of instruction. School reform has been a big issue the past several years, and school site councils include parent representatives. To find out more about school reform, you might want to check out The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University: http://www.annenberginstitute.org/. Another resource is the Catalog of School Reform from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/catalog/index.shtml With regards to the mathematics education, you might want to see what the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) http://www.nctm.org/elementary/index.asp You might also clarify with the teachers and the principal what the school position is on teaching and learning of mathematics and the assessment process which is currently in place. Hope this helps.
Cathleen Galas
On Friday, Mar 26, 2004, at 08:13 US/Pacific, Doug Wolfgram wrote:
I hope this isn't off-topic, but it occurs to me that e-toys and Squeak are the perfect tool for what I would like to see change at our school...
Recently, we invited Jill Tarter to come and speak at my daughter's school. She was very well received and her promotion of math and science was close to my heart, as I believe that all children should have a good foundation in the sciences.
Then I started thinking about Alan's demonstration of Squeak and the gravity exercises, etc. I realized that from my experience (please correct me if I'm wrong) most lower school math and science assessments assess only what a child has already learned, whereas with Squeak and e-toys, we can assess what they are CAPABLE of learning.
Isn't this more valuable information? Do those of you who are educators think this way? Am I just behind the curve here and all of you regular squeakers are saying "duh, we've been doing that?" :)
This has special meaning to me because my daughter, like me when I was in lower school, tends to make careless errors on math tests from going too fast. So this keeps her out of some of the advanced math pull-outs. Yet the kids in those pull-outs come to her for help because she knows the math and if she doesn't, can figure it out very quickly or knows who to ask and isn't afraid because she is very confident about her ability to understand what she will hear as a response. This seems to me to be a very big failing in this particular school anyway.
D
"Interactive Media that WORKS." ___________________________
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