No Child Need Ever Be Left Behind- A New Approach to Better Understanding, Learning and Excelling in Today's Schools.

Help is on the way! Better Schooling Systems has just announced an entirely new way of scoring tests for the k-12 educational system.

(PRWEB) May 22, 2004 -- Better Schooling Systems has just announced an entirely new way of scoring tests. All three parts, the what, the how, and the why, can be obtained for the item scores and combined test scores we provide to teachers.

The scoring system has three parts. The first part tells what the answer was. The second part tells how the answer was attempted and what error(s), if any, were made. The third part tells why each child answered the way he or she did, including how advanced in ability each of them has become. We can also suggest methods to teach toward the way they learn most easily.

How will you know when your child could do better? Consider these questions.

Is your child doing homework in preference to anything else? Is he or she an avid reader? Does he or she have only positive things to say about school?

Is your teenager more concerned about what his or her peers are doing or wearing than school success? Is your child addicted to television, the latest music craze or to computer games?

If your answers to the first three questions is No," and to the second two is Yes," your child is not doing as well in school as he or she could!

Many people do not realize it, but nearly all children can do much better in school than they are now doing. Why? Because the way we currently find out how well they are doing is from test scores. But test scores have serious problems.

Harry gave forty right" answers on a test with sixty questions. Did he guess" some of the answers? Did he understand all the questions? Did he memorize answers without understanding, or have a crib sheets tucked into his backpack? We have no way of knowing from answers scored as right" which of these four possibilities are true. Faked answers occur much more frequently than we expect them to.

Did he show his work? Did he read the question differently than intended? Did he make easily correctable errors, like leaving out steps? Did he know more about the subject than his teachers? Hasty responses under pressure, such as leaving out the work, or solution steps, or interpreting the question differently are the most common source of errors." Errors lower scores, sometimes more drastically then the errors deserve. Test scores dont tell teachers where he went wrong.

There are other issues too. Did he use the method to solve the problem that the teacher taught, or some simpler or (more advanced) method that gave the same answer? Any correct method that gives the right" will get full credit. Sometimes a more advanced approach correctly gives a different answer that that will be marked wrong!" Without even considering the how eager he was to do well, or whether this was his off day, we can already see that each answers score is full of interpretation problems.

Now let us add the scores from each answer to get a grade. Which answers were wrong that led to the C" instead of an A?" There is no way of knowing, once the total score has been found. In short, the test scores we are using today are worse than useless in helping our children to do better in school. They can actually do harm!

How can this statement be true? Lets look at what has just been said. Students can get right" answers through memorization without understanding, or by using primitive methods, such as using counting tally marks instead of knowing number facts. This means that they can gain marks with inadequate work or effort. Pass marks are seldom 100 percent. They can be allowed to sneak by with huge holes in their knowledge and skills. The fact that they are being left behind can be invisible in their scores.

In the other hand, they can be marked down for hasty responses under pressure or having an off day and even for having a more profound understanding than their teachers. So our best students are often downgraded for their ability and our worst students are often given a free ride.

How can we be certain that no child is left behind" with a test scoring system that is so faulty? Notice that we said a scoring" system and not a testing" system. Many of our tests are well designed and constructed. The information about how our children went about answering is almost always embedded in the answers they gave, when we know what to look for. We need to look for more than what the answers were. We also need to look for how the answer was produced and why Harry answered the way he did.

How can teachers help their students if the score" is all that matters and no effort is made to record what they do not know or cannot do? This latter information is essential for effective teaching but is removed by the way we score! If we dont know why they answered the way they did, how could we help them to do better? We need a scoring system that teachers can use to help our children.

What does all this tell us? There are a lot of things about what children know and can do or do not know and cannot do that are invisible in test scores. Before we knew about bacteria we put leeches on people to drain out bad blood." This was because, until we had microscopes, bacteria were invisible to us. In this same way, our new approach makes the invisible visible.