SOF is a Coalition School (http://www.essentialschools.org/) that focuses on small classes, inquiry based learning/teacher as coach, less is more... While the school sees testing as ONE method of assessing for understanding, it believes that its not the ONLY way. So, for the Regents exams, we designed our curriculum so that the kids have enough knowledge to pass it in January so that they can focus on their research projects in June. This is easy since I see the same set of kids for two years in a row for 9th and 10th grade science (this design used to be called "housing").
SOF use to have a waiver for the Regents exams, but the State mandate took that away. The class of 2007 (who were my students and also the first set of students at SOF to take the Living Environments) had a 92% passing rate. This January, my students received a 97% passing rate (out of 100 students). Several thoughts came in mind. I think in bullets. So, here are my thoughts:
- The 97% is based on the curved score. The passing raw score was a 39 out of 85 possible points.
- Can they cheapen science education any futher?
- Yeah, so I read the exam. It was definitely tougher than most of the other exams. But, hey, I think I taught them enough material for them to all pass it without a curve. I think that the kids were mostly frustrated with the length of the exam. But hey, they really just needed to read each question carefully, then take a couple of extra steps to answer the questions.
- Okay, so it IS a curve and I'm sure their sampling methods were fine. So yeah, if you want to be optimistic, its a good passing rate compared with "others".
So what am I really saying here? I'm happy that my kids passed, but I also feel as though everyone got a free ride, even after all that practice we did, "Yeah, we'll scare you with all the Regents requirement hype, and make the curriculum rigorous like heck, but at the end, we'll just assess everyone on a curve, okay?"
Look, I'm proud of the science curriculum we've set at SOF, and okay, so we are so good at what we do that yes, we deserve such a high passing rate. I just wish I worked in a state where the curriculum and assessment made SENSE.
The exam gave me some ideas that can make my curriculum even more rigorous. Reproduction, genetics, biotechnology - hot topics that it focused on in addition to the usual ecology. We have already great project-based units that encompass the topics, and I'm brainstorming on elaborating on them even more.
After some post-exam group reflection, the kids tell me that the Regents Community review really helped. They said that the talking and listening to how problems were done by their peers helped them recall information better. To some extent, they admitted that my ass kicking (making practice homework count as a quiz, pop quizzes, calling parents) helped.
Regents are over, time to do some real fun science!
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