Finally: A book on standardized testing your hippie girlfriend will enjoy
Daniel Koretz of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education took the lecture notes from his course, “Methods of Educational Measurement,” and turned it into a book: Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It’s readable, filled with funny anecdotes, and contains absolutely nothing that will be new to regular GNXP readers.
But because Koretz takes the math and most of the controversy out of the debate over standardized tests, he has time to actually drill home a couple of important points repeatedly: Modern standardized tests have little bias, are pretty reliable, and while they don’t tell you everything about a person or a school or a city, they are good for making rough predictions.
Hence, the title of this blog post: Feel free to recommend Measuring Up as a “baby steps” book for your favorite sociologist or folk guitarist.
Koretz waves his political correctness card early on, letting us know that “IQ [is] just one type of score on one type of standardized test…” and he lets us know about the “pernicious and unfounded view that differences in test scores between racial and ethnic groups are biologically determined.” But you already knew he was going to say that, right? And in an unintended parody of blank-slatism, he has a chapter entitled “What influences test scores” that never once mentions genetic factors, even to dismiss them.
Koretz does a great job dodging such troubling questions while focusing on what he really wants to talk about, with solid, candid chapters entitled “Validity,” “Inflated Test Scores,” “Error and Reliability,” chapters that actually do a good job of conveying big ideas about non-experimental social science in jargon-free prose. Kudos to him for doing so.
Treat it as a book on the narrow field of psychometrics and its link to policy, not as a book on the broader field of standardized tests per se and its link to policy: You’ll spend a lot less time grinding your teeth.
Labels: Psychology
And here is the Amazon URL: Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us
Feel free to modify it so that it sends creds back to GNXP.
I’m thinking of writing a book on Thermodynamics where I’ll explain that Specific Enthalpy is just one equilibrium function among many, and dismiss the pernicious view that it is determined by the nature of the material in question, its density and pressure.
hippie girlfriend will enjoy
…too much information herrick ;-) don’t burst the bubble of your mystery.
bio–is there definite proof that can convince all educated people that genes are behind IQ differentials between groups? Can one take issue with this evidence? Yes? Then you’re sarcasm is a bit much no?
Is there definite evidence that can convince educated people that Evolution is the explanation for the patterns of life on the earth today? Yes.
Do educated people take issue with this evidence? Yes! We call them creationists.
Richard Sharpe,
are you implying that abe is uneducated because he doesn’t think biological evolution is the cause of between group gaps on intelligence tests?
If so, you’re the uneducated one. If not, you’re attacking a straw man.
ben g says:
Richard Sharpe,
are you implying that abe is uneducated because he doesn’t think biological evolution is the cause of between group gaps on intelligence tests?
If so, you’re the uneducated one. If not, you’re attacking a straw man.
I thought my point was more subtle than that, however, it is true that I have no more than a four year degree from an Australian University.
Moreover, at no point did I state that Abe was uneducated, nor did I imply it.
I thought my point was more subtle than that
ok, perhaps i missed it. what was it?
ben, do you have an ETA on when you and Marc will make your big hapmap post?