What? A new education blog?
Oh, yes, right after I just said that I thought my posts would taper off, I discovered (via lovable Aussie bulldog Tim Blair ) a new education-related blog by Jeff Sackman - The Confidence Man. His byword? "Reliable information". Oh yeah? Let's see your KR-20 value. (Sorry, psychometric geek joke there.)
Anyway, he found some stories that I missed, so I'm going to poach links off him and provide some additional commentary on a couple of noteworthy stories (not that you shouldn't go read entire his site immediately).
1. I missed the Kohn editoral in last Friday's USA Today that bewails the tragedy that poor and minority students are more likely to suffer the "sterile" and "stigmatizing" environment of summer school, that "summer prison" (gee, no hyperbole there) that forces kids to learn the educational basics in order to improve their test scores. If, as Kohn says, "Research overwhelmingly demonstrates that the worst thing you can do for struggling students is hold them back a year", then what option other than summer school is there? I notice that he doesn't mention any overwhelming amounts of research to support his claim that tougher school standards reduce the quality of education, or that kids who haven't yet gotten the basic skills down pat could somehow benefit from the removal of standardized tests. Yes, that's his suggested solution to the summer school problem. Funny how those little multiple-choice items get blamed for everything.
2. Up to now, I've avoiding posting about the recent federal appeals court ruling that the U. of Michigan law school can give preferential treatment to minorites (link to story at NYTimes here, free registration required), mainly because the issue didn't seem to be that the law school doesn't believe in using the LSAT, but they do feel they should be able to disregard it in favor of "diversity". My postings tend to focus on the validity of test score use, but the fact is that if you want an incoming law class to be determined by race rather than LSAT scores, that doesn't mean the test is being used or interpreted in an invalid fashion. However, I should have at least provided a link to the story, because it IS a big story in terms of affirmative action and the ongoing "diversity" debate.
I have to comment here on Jeff's posting,
"Also enormous is 11 points [out of 180] on the LSAT [that Michigan decided race was worth when determining admissions]. The test is a fair judge of one's ability to apply comprehension and critical thinking skills. I've looked at every single LSAT ever published, and there's nothing in there that I can see that unfairly favors one group over another."
Now I realize that this IS a test validity issue. Jeff is the first non-psychometrician I've seen who's written anything like this, and I'm glad he did, for two reasons. First of all, the theory that current large-scale standardized tests contain questions that are biased against any subgroup (based on race or sex) is the biggest urban legend that anti-testing agitators circulate. I know from experience that these tests go through an enormous amount of pre-testing and review, and every test question is examined carefully for signs of differential item functioning, or DIF. I'm not going to explain DIF in great detail here, but the gist of it is that psychometricians consider a question to be biased when members of different subgroups who are performing at the same level score differently on that item. If, during pre-testing, high-scoring people in Group A have a lot of trouble with a question that high-scoring people in Group B do not, that item does not go on the test. Period.
However, a great deal of controversy stems from the fact that anti-testing activists consider overall group differences to be evidence of bias, when this is not the case. A group mean difference in test scores that favors Group B over Group A is not proof that the test is biased against Group A. More likely, it means that, on average, Group A hasn't yet learned the skills necessary for the test, or that Group A is not taking the test as seriously as Group B, or that Group A has not benefiting from enough test preparation, or that Group A suffers from stereotype threat (see Claude Steele's work). Many people who are knowledgable in educational testing see affirmative action as necessary to counteract racism and negative stereotyping, but on the other hand, many educators and psychometricians view Michigan's affirmative action as biased against Caucasians and detrimental to African-Americans who are admitted after displaying lower levels of compentency on the analytical skills measured by the LSAT.
This is related to my second point, a more emotional one for me, which is that those who spread the rumor that such tests are biased really get my goat. The underlying assumption is that test developers and psychometricans are all Caucasian (false) men (extremely false) who deliberately include biased test questions (utterly false) in order to keep minorities from advancing (uttter rubbish).
I can sympathize with the desire to give an extra push to students who may not test well, due to stereotype threat or lack of preparation. I draw the line, however, at the suggestion that the LSAT is so inherently biased that certain candidates should be awarded 11 LSAT points just because of skin color. There is no evidence to suggest that this is a valid interpretation of LSAT scores.