The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is launching an ambitious research project to figure out why so many of its freshmen need remediation in reading and math. Every incoming student will be evaluated “to reverse-engineer his academic upbringing,” UNLV president Neal Smatresk tells the Las Vegas Sun. Since eighty percent of UNLV’s undergrads come from a single source, the state’s own Clark County School District, Smatresk hopes to gain particularly vivid insights.
Data gathered from the academic assessments would be shared with school districts and could help educators identify and correct patterns of weakness, whether it be general flaws in teaching philosophies or student study habits. Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said the research findings could offer important insight into the root causes of the problems requiring remediation.
“The possibility that the district will be able to identify clusters of underachieving students, and trace them to not only individual campuses but individual classrooms, has Clark County’s teachers union on edge,” the paper notes.
Last year, more than a third of Nevada’s high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million.
Item analysis associated with any test is perhaps the most valuable component of the testing process. Teachers/schools get to go through the test to determine how their students performed on each individual item. It is as sure-fired a remedy to correct errors and oversights from the classroom as exists today.
Of course, it’s always helpful if this information is used to improve instruction and not in any punitive manner.
Robert,
Loved last week’s item on Russ Whitehurst and the impact of curriculum on school outputs. Always believed standards were necessary but far too vague to get done in the classroom what was needed for kids to succeed. One of the better reasoned arguments in Hirsch’s recent book.
So, if we do get national standards/tests will they be accompanied by a national curriculum or will each local/state be left to develop their own curricula in an attempt to meet the standards? I think I know the answer to that rhetorical already.