STAR test results online
There are plenty of news reports about the newly released STAR test data from last year's standardized testing. The Chron even printed a whole section with data for all Bay Area schools. ZZZzzzzzzzz.......
But you, dear reader, are on-line. Why bother sifting through a lot of printed chaffe? Just go to the STAR 2007 Test Results page and dig in. You can see slice and dice the results to your heart's content.
Or just sit back and enjoy vacation. This data is most useful to the teachers and school administrators that know which tests your student has taken, how their classmates are progressing, which deficiencies may be identified...
I have a large appetite for testing stats. But the STAR results are not really meant for us educational consumers. The SFUSD results are pretty good. Check. With plenty of info about the achievement gaps. Check. Let's hope the teachers are able to harness all this data to help them address their students' needs.
But you, dear reader, are on-line. Why bother sifting through a lot of printed chaffe? Just go to the STAR 2007 Test Results page and dig in. You can see slice and dice the results to your heart's content.
Or just sit back and enjoy vacation. This data is most useful to the teachers and school administrators that know which tests your student has taken, how their classmates are progressing, which deficiencies may be identified...
I have a large appetite for testing stats. But the STAR results are not really meant for us educational consumers. The SFUSD results are pretty good. Check. With plenty of info about the achievement gaps. Check. Let's hope the teachers are able to harness all this data to help them address their students' needs.
Labels: Enrollment
4 Comments:
The undiluted STAR results are too much for the non-numbers-obsessed to absorb, IMHO. But the weird thing is the way the press has chosen to interpret the scores. The Chronicle picks three grades for snapshots, while the Examiner chose to add together the scores for every tested grade in each school and average them. So the results shown by the two papers may be complete different.
Sorry, I mean "completely" different; and then I accidentally posted before I'd finished my comment. I was going to say that the API, in which Calif. Dept. of Education statisticians use (supposedly) sound metholodogy to boil the test scores down into one E-Z number for a school, is much easier for the layperson to digest. It'll come out in a while.
Actually, KC, I'd love to get your view on the ways the newspapers report those test scores, as noted in my first comment here. I'm asking you as a non-numbers person to a numbers person, of course. Are those valid and legit ways to get a snapshot of a school from the figures, and is there a better one?
Mostly I think it is a waste of time. These test scores are useful for teachers and parents. I don't think it is valid to try and tease info about the overall school performance, or the school district performance, from these data. The API data is designed for that purpose, and arguably does a better job.
I like getting the test reports for my two students. That's different. They're designed to provide insight into individual students strengths and weaknesses. It's just hard to aggregate this data to give a clear picture of how a school or a district is doing.
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