The educational system Essay Example for Free

The educational system Essay The educational system of the United States has undergone several reforms that coincide with the political perspective at that time (Hochschild Scovronick, 2003). Consequently, the drastic reforms often left the schools confused. One thing that educational reforms all share is the reliance on state or standardized tests. These achievement tests have been used to measure the performance of schools and statistics had been used to prove whether a school was performing within the standards set by the state. Test scores have been shown to be reliable indicators of learning competencies if the tests match the curriculum of the schools and this is a challenge for there are different schools in the country that follows different approaches to teaching and learning philosophies (Hochschild Scovronick, 2003). The state however requires that all schools should follow state mandated minimum learning competencies across all levels. The diversity of the cultural backgrounds of students in our schools is a fact and one that has been emphasized by educators as a limitation to testing, however, test developers had responded to this issue by improving their norming population and to revise test items that were found to be culturally biased. Thus, they argue that test scores is indeed an objective measure of academic performance. Studies on test performance and academic performance have tried to establish that there is a positive relationship between the two; when test scores are high, academic grades also is high (Goodwin Leech, 2003). Therefore, a school that has high test scores is performing well. An interesting research question in this respect is to determine whether schools that have high test scores indeed are better schools. This is an important research question because so much depends on standardized tests and it is only right that it should be an objective and valid measure of the school’s performance. This can be measured by taking the academic grades of the school and correlating it with the specific subtests scores in the state-wide standardized tests, the hypothesis is that this schools would have high positive correlation between subject grades and subtest scores. What is being established by this research question is whether subject grades also reflect the same scores in the subtests; it is a fact that test scores and performance rates are computed based on the overall test score and even researches use the general academic average to correlate it with the overall test score. Correlation only tests relationships and associations, it does not attribute causation, thus one cannot say that higher academic grades causes higher test scores or vice versa, but it has been assumed that it does. Correlation however is the best tool to use in this situation since test scores and academic grades have a linear relationship and are a normal distribution (Triola, 2004). The results of the inquiry would establish the association between test scores and academic grades for every subject area tested. This would give us a better indicator of performance rather than just using the over-all scores and general average wherein values get lost in the averaging process. Moreover, tests of correlation can determine the direction of the relationship and the effect size (Triola, 2004). On the other hand, correlation can be used to misrepresent the results by attributing causality to the either one of the variables (Triola, 2004). Also, most reports do not cite the correlation coefficient nor the effect size, but merely says that well-performing schools have higher test scores without even discussing how schools are identified as well-performing or not, it is also assumed that high test scores is synonymous to better schools. When it is statistically possible to increase test score performance ratings by practices such as teaching to the test, choosing only the best students to take the test, or to limit the number of slow learners taking the test or even to just use the average of all the scores in every level to determine test performance ratings (Goodwin Leech, 2003). References Hochschild, J. Scovronick, N. (2003).The American Dream and the Public Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, L. Leech, N. (2003). The meaning of validity in the new Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing: Implications for measurement courses. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 36;3, 181-91. Triola, M. (2004). Elementary Statistics 9th ed. New York: Pearson-Addison Wesley Press.