Education

Assessments are a tricky business. Writing an exam that successfully tests a person’s knowledge or abilities, without inadvertently giving preference or advantage to certain demographics, is very difficult. The examinations I’ve written so far for my job fall into the category of testing whether a student has mastered a certain curriculum. After a couple of months of class, we give them an exam to check if they learned all that they were supposed to. Everybody is used to such tests, and everybody has experienced them. ...

Over the past couple of weeks at work, I’ve been working on revising some of the exams for our elementary school curriculum. This has been an interesting task full of challenges. One thing I’m constantly working on is putting myself in the headspace of a bright, but still young, elementary school student. What wording can I allow in problems? How long can a problem be before we’re testing their reading comprehension instead of their math? How many problems should there be? How many problems of a certain level of difficulty? There are so many questions to discuss, but one is a bit more fundamental than all others, and can help inform the answers to each subsequent question. What do we want our test to test? ...

Over the past 6 months or so, the idea of pushing and pulling in education has been on my mind. What I mean by this is whether we should focus on pushing kids who are achieving in a particular subject as much as we can – advanced study in mathematics and reading, honors classes, extracurricular options – or focus on pulling kids up who have struggled in some subjects. I have been intrigued by this dichotomy in the education system precisely because I have seen both sides of it, and it makes me feel conflicted. ...

 Read part 1 here. In light of the election, I have been on a bit of a thought and writing spree. While I recently processed through a fair bit of the election as a whole, there is so much that will be affected that I need to take it bit by bit. Right now I am thinking about education, particularly mathematics education, as this is something very near to me and something I have a strong passion for. ...