March 29, 2024

Memorization won’t help student achievement

Sue Atkinson

Baxter

The Iowa Department of Education is posting examples of new teaching methods that work with all learning styles for a concept-based curriculum. Why? The Iowa Assessments (even if they used a grade-level standard rather than the low 41st National Percentile Ranking) must be replaced because the Iowa-based educators writing the exams are unable to design a testing assessment for applied concepts — hence the reason for changing to the Smarter Balanced exams next year for grades 3-11. Similarly, the Iowa-based ACT exams are under scrutiny by an increasing number of higher ed institutions around the country for their failure to test for applied concepts. Even though the ACT standards were raised this year, the Iowa base means they continue to use memorization rather than concepts.

Two examples of continued teaching deficiency would be: memorizing sight words and increasing the amount of reading in the mistaken belief this makes up for failure to effectively teach all five reading concepts. Unless the extra reading is about the five reading concepts so students can demonstrate their proficiency on concept-based exams, this is wasted time (just as memorizing sight words is a waste of time). Concept-based exams will show the poor results of these methods. How many Iowa schools fail to show sufficient reading progress on the Annual Yearly Progress reports, and fail to connect this to the use of memorized sight words?

Decisions being made by schools for planning purposes should be influenced by: 1) the state-acknowledged poor quality of training in the teacher prep programs; 2) the type of exams used to assess the effectiveness of the methods (only concept-based truly show student proficiencies); and 3) whether or not students continue to be profiled and scapegoated as excuses for poor performance of the delivery system (the number of Special Ed. students should decrease). The 2004 Manhattan Institute teachability report showed the improvement occurring when students are not profiled and scapegoated, but Iowa’s education system has rejected those findings (in spite of their success in other states and in countries out-educating us). No Child Left Behind only allows for 5 percent of student test scores not counting because, statistically, 95 percent of individuals have learning capacity within normal limits when a concept-based curriculum and effective teaching of concepts interact with all learning styles. Remember that the recent Annual Yearly Progress reports are based on the poor Iowa Assessments with their low proficiency standard that inflates results.