Now, I'm all for giving students non-monetary incentives to improve their academic performance. However, I find this a little....skeevy:
In an effort to encourage ninth-graders at East Ascension High School to take a standardized test seriously last year, a poster was circulated at the school promising students they would have a chance to dunk Algebra I teacher Judy Braud. The advertising gimmick worked as 156 sophomores made the grade...
The students were rewarded with a day in the sun for earning a higher score on the ninth-grade IOWA than they did in the seventh grade. "All they had to do was improve by one point and they were eligible for the fun day," she explained.
I understand that the IOWA is used for school ranking and not student ranking, and therefore students might not take it seriously. But still, giving credit for a one-point increase in scores? That makes it obvious that the school wasn't comfortable with rewarding only those students who made meaningful improvement, but was willing to reward those who basically stayed the same (the one-point increase is most likely well within the standard error of measurement).
Plus, if the kids did better on the test, why make one of the rewards a kind of "punishment" for their teachers? Yes, I know dunking is in good fun - but isn't it nice to imagine a situation in which teachers get dunked if their students do worse on the exam? Doesn't it make more sense for a student to want to dunk a teacher who shortchanged them, rather than one who helped them improve their scores?
Posted by kswygert at September 8, 2003 10:43 AM