Notes for the workshop leader

Thanks very much for taking the time to lead this workshop. The activites and even the interactive model are still works in progress and we'd appreciate any feedback that can help us improve them. The following are recommendations for getting started and carrying out the workshop.

Preparation

Please read through the activities and actually try them out using the interactive model before conducting the workshop. This is absolutely essential!

Problems with the model

While a great deal of effort has gone into making the interactive model, some features do not yet work as intended. Here is a list of known problems.

• Returning sliders to previous states does not necessarily return Kalie's score to its previous states.
• The order in which you change sliders matters, when it shouldn't.
• Out-of-school knowledge currently has no effect on Kalie's results. This is an important gap; certainly childrens' experiences outside school have a great affect on their performance in school and on standardized tests.
• Kalie's math knowledge (the yellow box) should be influenced by the curriculum sliders, especially if her 'School skills' are high. Currently that relationship hasn't been implemented.

To overcome these problems, we recommend moving any slider only one time. If you want to reset a slider, it's best to refresh the whole page in your browser and start over. Future versions of the model will overcome these and other deficiencies. If you come across any other problems or strange things please note them and let us know; we intend to incorporate as much feedback as possible!

Conducting the workshop

The workshop is intended to be conducted in a room with at least one computer for every 3 parents. Each activity is meant to be conducted in small groups with parents working together to accomplish the tasks and share their reasoning. The workshop is intended to take less than 2 hours. Here's a suggested schedule:

5min
Personal introductions

15min
Introducing the workshop

Most of the content for the introduction is on the first page. Feel free to customize it to meet your group's needs, but be sure to give the participants a sense of what to expect. It might be helpful to introduce topics that are controversial and noticeable in the media, such as accountability issues or teaching to the test. You could also solicit participants as to topics they're interested in or their motivation for attending; then you can try to address these concerns as they arise in the activities.

20 minutes
Understanding the histogram and percentile

Optional, 5-30 minutes
Introducing the sliders

If participants have difficulty understanding the model, you could help them explore the effects of sliders one at a time by going through this process for each: predict the slider's effect, explore, then describe the slider's effect. Describing effects in terms of both the overlapping squares and the results on Kalie's scores will help to illustrate their intended effects. Here are some prompting questions for each group of sliders:

Kalie’s knowledge
Kalie has a test in math, she studies hard and enjoys the class; she learns and knows a lot. How would you expect her to do?
Move the sliders and find note what changes occur.
Kalie knows less, but she gets lucky, guesses correctly.
How would you expect her to do?
Move the sliders and find note what changes occur.

Test
Say Kalie knows a lot about math.
What if the test she took is really hard?
What if the test measures things she hasn’t learned?
What if the test has subtle cues or relies on knowledge that is ‘common sense’ to one cultural group, but not to others?
What if the test makers are not too confident about the test results? If Kalie takes the test on a number of different occasions, she might score very differently.

Curriculum
What if the teacher teaches things that aren’t on or measured by the test?

Standards
What if the standards (what the district thinks kids Kalie’s age should know in math) are not tied closely to the test or the curriculum?
What if the teacher doesn’t use the standards in her lessons?
What if the test isn’t designed for the standards, but is a general national test?

20 minutes
Factors influencing test scores

20 minutes
Kalie's story

After the groups come up with alternate explanations, it's important that they have a chance to share those explanations as a whole group, and discuss 1) what information they'd need to decide which explanation is most likely, and 2) how to get that information.

10 min
Reflection

It can be helpful at this point to ask participants to informally write down their reflections on how test scores have impacted their children's academic lives and school experience.

20 min
Discussion

To close, consider discussing some of these questions, if you have time and resources:

• How are tests used in our area?
• What should we do about tests?
• When tests give us bad news, what do we do?
• What are successful interventions?
• What are examples of some successful interventions?
• Is parent activism or wider community discussion called for?