Annotated Bibliography On Standardized Testing

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Annotated Bibliography Annotated Bibliography Boese, E. (2011) Standardized Tests: Shouldn’t We Be Helping Our Students? In Reid, S. The Prentice Hall Essential Guide for College Writers (pp. 342-348) Englewood Cliffs. NJ: Prentice Hall. In his essay, “Standardized Tests: Shouldn’t We Be Helping Our Students” Colorado State University student Eric Boese (2011) passionately expresses his assertions that standardized testing is degrading the quality of American education; he argues (specifically with the intent to persuade readers and in particular test policy setting politicians) that standardized tests are too difficult and fail to properly measure and motivate the qualitative performance of both teacher and student. This reader takes…show more content…
The converse has been found to be true as well: Instructional strategies that appear to slow the learner's progress during training often lead to better post training or transfer performance. For example, many studies have shown beneficial effects of random over blocked practice on transfer of learning, even though blocked practice often leads to better performance during the training session. In a 2 × 3 factorial experiment (N = 120), with the factors practice schedule (random, blocked) and critical thinking prompts (before task, after task, none), this study investigates whether this also applies to complex judgment tasks and whether critical thinking prompts can enhance the effectiveness of particular practice schedules. It is hypothesized that prompts provided after task execution yield best transfer in a random practice schedule, whereas prompts provided before task execution yield best transfer in a blocked schedule. In line with this hypothesis, a blocked schedule led to better performance than random practice during training but not on the transfer test, where a random schedule was beneficial. The hypothesized interaction effect was also found: Critical thinking prompts after task execution significantly benefit transfer performance of participants following a random schedule, and transfer performance following…show more content…
One might have expected to see corresponding interest in motivation for teaching, not only because teachers influence students, but also because teachers are worthy of study in their own right. Interestingly, however, until very recently, there was almost no systematic, theory-driven research on teacher motivation. Moreover, contemporary theories of student motivation emphasize how different goals and motives create qualitatively different systems of meaning and action ( Ames, 1992; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Dweck, 1986; Nicholls, 1989). In contrast, when researchers included a measure of teacher motivation, most focused on the level or “quantity” of indicators such as job satisfaction and treated motivation for teaching only as an outcome, rather than as a predictor (e.g., de Jesus & Lens, 2005). Some researchers have recently begun to address these lacunae by extending theories that have proven useful in understanding student motivation to

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