Now a school in Southeast Washington, DCm is under suspicion of cheating, thanks to roller-coaster Stanford 9 scores:
Less than two years ago, Moten Elementary in Southeast Washington celebrated a sharp rise in standardized test scores that placed its students among the most accomplished in the school system.
Twelve months later, the scores plunged. Now, Moten's results on the Stanford 9 Achievement Test are among the lowest of the more than 100 public elementary schools in the District...
...testing specialists outside the school system said the changes in scores -- coupled with the observations of some former Moten teachers -- raise questions about whether cheating occurred.
In the spring of 2002, only 3.3 percent of Moten's students tested in math scored "below basic" -- the Stanford 9's lowest category of scoring -- and 2.4 percent tested below basic in reading. But results from the spring test in 2003, which were released in the fall, showed 69 percent of its students scoring below basic in math and 55 percent scoring below basic in reading. The steep declines occurred in grades 4 through 6.
Something's not right here. The Stanford 9 didn't move the goalposts, or we would have seen these results everywhere. Did the type of student (i.e., special education or not) change from 2002 to 2003? Even that wouldn't necessarily explain this. But cheating - as in, changing answer sheets, or giving students the answers - would.
What's the school district going to do about it? Nothing.
Caritj said the school system is not planning to investigate further -- or to interview school staff members who were present at the exam -- because nobody has come forward to claim that cheating occurred. The principal who presided over the 2002 testing has retired; and the 2003 data appear legitimate and can be used to guide instruction...
In interviews, three former teachers at Moten before 2002 said they observed a number of testing irregularities during other years when the school's scores rose. They said they suspected that someone was changing students' answer sheets. They also said some students who struggled with basic math and reading were achieving near-perfect scores.
One of those teachers, Kelly Knepper, said that in the 1999-2000 school year, the first 10 students on her class's alphabetical roster scored in the top percentiles on the Stanford 9, yet her other 10 students scored poorly. One student was having trouble subtracting 3 from 5 just two days before the test, yet scored in the 99th percentile in math, the former fifth-grade teacher said.
Yep, sounds like somebody cooked the books that year, and it seems the guilty parties will go unpunished. The kids, however, are now suffering, because the new and presumably correct test results indicate that the school is doing a lousy job of educating its students. A fifth-grade teacher claims that one of her students couldn't subtract 3 from 5? A first-grader should be able to do that - on his fingers, perhaps, but still.
Cheating expert, fellow psychometrician, and all-around nice guy Greg Cizek is on the spot with a comment:
Gregory J. Cizek, who teaches educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he suspects that answer sheets were changed. "My hunch is there's some point in the handling of these documents that they've been altered," said Cizek, who is the author of the book "Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It and Prevent It."
"I'm trying to think of any other plausible explanation, but I'm just not able to come up with one," he said.
Read more about Dr. Cizek's work here.
Posted by kswygert at February 1, 2004 08:08 PM