 |
This page is dedicated to students who are having trouble passing the Alabama Graduation Exam in Social Studies. Here you will find my tutorial notes, film study guides, some links to steaming films that are very helpful, sample tests and even a free quiz game to download. I wish you good luck as you get ready for your test.
American History Materials
AHSGE Item Specifications
Notes
Schlessinger Film Study Guide
History Puzzles
Additional Films
Practice Tests
MindPoint Quiz Show Files
Annenburg Online History Course
Tater Tot - Tutorials
Benjamin Bloom
The Reality of Teaching
I want my students to think about the nature of life and so on, but the state expects to be able to see achievement and performance. As much as I believe in the need to teach my students to think for themselves, I have a responsibility to prepare my students for the state’s accountability. Rather than bemoan the existence of testing, which would be a waste of time and energy, rather than discuss the issues of validity and reliability and the theories of testing, I believe that it is my responsibility to prepare my students for the testing experience. As a result, although I have my own opinions about concepts like CRT’S and NRT’S, I take my responsibility to prepare my students for achievement test very seriously.
It is to this end that I believe we should either educate the educational community about the legitimacy of achievement tests, or teach teachers how to best prepare their students for the tests that they are going to have to pass.
As a teacher who knows something of psychology, I decided several years ago that if anyone in my department should be charged with the job of preparing students for the Alabama High School Graduation Exam it should be me. I volunteered to teach the remedial social studies classes in my high school not because I am a great historian. Having a great historian is not what a remedial student needs anyway. I volunteered because I believed that I could create a mastery learning program that could prepare students for the exam.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Benjamin Bloom made a number of specific predictions about the gains from mastery learning programs. One was that in classes taught for mastery, 95% of the students would achieve at the level previously reached by the top 5%. That means that typical scores in a mastery classroom would be around the ninety-eighth percentile, or approximately two standard deviations above the mean. The significance here is simple. Students that are taught using a mastery learning perform at a much higher achievement level than students who are taught using traditional methods.
In my opinion, my job is less about debating the educational issues of achievement testing and more about using the current research to prepare my kids. With that in mind, we must do a better job of educating the next generation of educators about the process of mastery learning or similar methods that have been shown to effectively raise the scores of students. Future teachers must be trained in how to find good quality test questions that are similar to the types of questions that their students will face on the test. They must to be trained in preparing specific objectives that are testable and are directly correlated to the testing materials and standards. teachers must learn that they are expected to stick to the specific objectives that they are teaching. In today’s world of high achievement there is little room for extraneous material.
This may sound like I am advocating that teachers be taught to teach to the test. I am not, yet we are evaluated on specific measurable tests and the reality is that we must teach the specific objectives that are tested on the specific test. We must never simply teach our students the test, nor should we teach to the test, but we should be aware of the test and be skilled enough to teach specifically to the objectives that are found in the test. Even though that sounds like a subtle difference it is a significant one to me.