100 Million Blogs

From today's Education Week:

NAEP Writing Exams Going Digital in 2011
By Lynn Olson

Starting in 2011, the National Assessment of Educational Progress will test how well students in grades 8 and 12 can write on computers, rather than with the old schoolhouse standbys of pencils and paper.

The board that oversees NAEP, called “the nation’s report card,” unanimously approved the change from handwritten to computerized exams as part of a new framework for the writing assessment adopted at a March 1-3 meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

In 4th grade, writing will still be tested using a paper-and-pencil format in 2011, in part because many elementary students currently lack keyboarding skills and experience. But the framework encourages a computer-based writing assessment for that grade as well by 2019.

The National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the federally sponsored assessment, approved the changes to reflect the ways in which technology has changed the way people write and the kinds of writing they do.

According to the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework, 100 million blogs—online journals—now exist worldwide, and 171 billion e-mail messages are sent daily. Future writing instruction, it says, must take into account how computers affect both the writing process and the types of text produced.

The article concludes with a quote from NCTE president-elect Kathi Yancey: The framework "provides for a more rhetorical view of writing, where purpose and audience are at the center of writing tasks.” The framework also “invites students as writers to compose at the keyboard,” she added, “which provides a direct link to the kind of composing writers do in college and in the workplace, thus bringing this assessment in line with lifelong composing practices.”

You can read the whole thing here (registration required).

Bracey on NAEP

The 2005 NAEP scores were released last week. I was going to post something when they first appeared, but I never got around to it, so here's Gerald Bracey's interesting take on them from The Huffington Post.

"Study: Despite Hard Courses, High Schoolers Learn Less." That paradoxical headline ran over a story in the Los Angeles Times February 23. Similar headlines appeared in the New York Times and papers all over the country. The stories under the headlines reported two related studies. One study found that high school students were taking more and tougher courses in math and science and getting better grades. Another found that NAEP reading scores of high school seniors had declined a bit since 1992.
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So why did the reading scores dip? Well, when was the last time you heard a Right Honorable and Self-Important School Reform Commission say that the problem with schools is that kids don't read enough Shakespeare? Or Faulkner? An occasional lament is heard that the western canon now includes Steinbeck, Morrison and Angelou, but no reform commission that I know of has ever laid the blame--the blame for whatever the commission is blaming the schools for--at the feet of English teachers. "A Nation At Risk" mentioned what English courses should teach, but its major concerns were science and technology.

The perpetual cry for the last 50 years has been more math, more science, more math, more science. "A Nation at Risk" called for adding computer science because "computers and computer-controlled equipment are penetrating every aspect of our lives" (no doubt the only image in a reform report to evoke simultaneously both a sex act and Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

It is quite possible that reading scores are down because the kids are taking more math and science courses. Sure there are other more familiar villains to charge: television, video games, the strange spelling and syntax of text messaging, even multitasking. But the number of courses the average high school student takes in mathematics, science, and computer science enroute to a diploma have all increased since 1990 (English classes have not). The time for these courses has to come from somewhere. Reading about quarks or taking derivatives jeopardize Jane Austen.

Mostly, though, I think the kids just don't give a damn about NAEP and I bet they give less of a damn now than they did 15 years ago. Nor should they care. I once said to then-NAEP Executive Director, Archie Lapointe, that NAEP systematically underestimates achievement because kids don't take it seriously. Yes, he laughed, the major challenge for NAEP was keeping the kids awake during the test.

Read the rest here.