SAGE Parent Meeting:
Harvest Elementary
March 31, 2014
There were 10 parents in attendance as well as Karl Bowman
who did the presentation. Mark Pew and
Paula Hill (she came in late) were there as well, but left 15 minutes into the
presentation to go to Hidden Hollow for their SAGE presentation.
Mr. Bowman presented a PowerPoint about SAGE testing. Mr. Bowman stated that about 12 different
states were looking at creating a test together, but Utah decided to develop
their own. Students who opt out of
testing will automatically be assigned a 1 (non-proficient) as per the State
School Board requirements. Students who
have opted out will still be counted toward the 95% participation requirement. SAGE is a computer adaptive test, which means
that when a student answers a question correctly, they are given a harder
question. When they answer a question
incorrectly, they will be given an easier question. There is a belief that this will more
accurately evaluate a child’s abilities more than a multiple choice test. This is the pilot year and test scores are
expected to drop about 20%. (This was
not discussed in this meeting, but at the ASD school board work session a few
weeks ago where SAGE was discussed, the district will not be loading the
non-proficient scores for those who opt out into Skyward. They will not be a part of your child’s
educational history.)
These are some of the questions that were asked:
Can students use a
paper and pencil for the test?
Yes, the test is done on the computer, but students are
given paper and pencil for the writing as well as the math sections.
Who decides how often
to administer the SAGE?
The district wants it administered in the fall as well as
the spring. It can also be administered
in the winter and Mr. Bowman indicated that he would leave that up to grade
level teams.
Why was this meeting
scheduled after SAGE had already started?
Mr. Bowman said he considered it just another end-of-year
test that they administer every year and did not schedule it in advance. There is also a window of time for the test
to be administered and they had to look at getting all of the students into the
computer lab to take the test during that window.
How much time have
students spent practicing?
There has not been a lot of time set aside at Harvest for
this and it is something they hope to improve on next year. Also, there was some concern expressed about
3rd graders and their typing abilities as far as speed. Mr. Bowman said that he is aware of that
issue and there has been discussion about having more keyboarding in second
grade so that when kids start taking the SAGE in 3rd grade, they
will be more proficient on the keyboard.
The school has also been making sure there are enough headphones as well
as computer mouses (or mice?).
Can teachers help
with computer issues with the test?
There was some concern from parents that the test was counter intuitive
in sections, like grabbing a star and repeatedly dragging it into various
boxes. Instead of typing the number answer,
students grab the number from a vertical number line. Mr. Bowman said that teachers would be able
to assist in questions regarding the computer, but not content.
Thank you Julie! Mrs. Hill told Hidden that the District will 'throw out the 1s that match the opt-out forms." We also took them to task on "Why is the meeting happening after the test had started". They did seem concerned at our pointing out their poor timing, that the timing inevitably illustrates an intent to down-play the tests occurring in, what we truly believe, to be a means of keeping parents out of the loop. (That goes along with the teachers doing an extremely poor job of announcing the test to parents)
ReplyDeleteA point to keep administrators on their toes: What part of the curriculum is it that the 2nd graders will NO LONGER learn in lueue of learning how to keyboard?
For math, we were assured that teachers teach all sorts of methods, the common core circle-and-dot type 'method' as well as old-fashioned computation...which yields the question: When scores are low on the SAGE, how many years do you think it will take till teachers STOP teaching computation 2? 3? It is inevitable.
Mrs. Hill seemed to insist that "Teaching to the test is just the way it is done" we took her to task on "Yes, but NOT if the test is BAD." She had no response to this accept to assure us that she works for us...
It seemed to me personally, that Mrs. Hill and Mr. Bowman had never seen any of the sample questions. That was just my impression. They hadn't done any research on AIR, and they were oblivious to the behavioral nature of the questions. They were friendly and sincere, but I did not get the impression that they cared whether "Shakespeare wrote his own works or not" if you catch my drift.
Lets continue to work together on this. We were looking to our principal teachers as allies.