Programs

Episode #101 Educational Tests: isunderstood Measuring Sticks - This program is intended to provide viewers with an understanding of four key concepts in educational measurement. The first of these concepts is the role of testing in allowing educators to make score-based inferences about students unobservable skills and knowledge. Second, the program makes it clear that educational testing is far less precise than most people believe. Third, viewers are informed about the differences among selected-response, short-answer, and performance-task types of test items, then are told about the difference between aptitude tests and achievement tests. Finally, this first program explains the distinction between relative and absolute score-based interpretations of children's test performances.

Episode #102 Evaluating Schools: Right Task, Wrong Tests - This program explains to viewers why it is that students' scores on traditionally constructed standardized achievement tests do not provide an accurate picture of a school's effectiveness. By presenting actual, but slightly modified items from currently used nationally standardized achievement tests, the program helps viewers recognize that such tests tend to measure what students bring to school, not what they learn there. In other words, many items in nationally standardized achievement tests, and even in most state-customized achievement tests, are linked to students' socioeconomic status or to their inherited academic aptitudes (such as children's in-born verbal, quantitative, and spatial capacities.) The attention-arresting topic in this second program is what happens when accountability-pressured teachers' test-preparation activities become excessive Episode

Episode #103 How to Evaluate Schools - This program describes four kinds of evidence that, in concert, can allow parents and other to arrive at a defensible estimate regarding a school's success. The four kinds of evidence are students' scores on standards-based tests; students' work-samples such as their original essays; students' affective data, that is, their attitudes and interests; and, finally, non-test indicators such as a school's attendance rates or its tardiness statistics. The final program's controversial topic centers on the enormous pressure today's educators are experiencing to improve their students' test scores.