What are your thoughts on the solutions? Which one is your favourite? Is there a good one I didn't cover? Let me know in the comments! *CUT FOR TIME:* _I cut this bit on gamifying education:_ Moreover, Khan Academy gamified education by rewarding energy points after each quiz. A matter of fact, gamifying education is another aspect of stealth assessments that work great! Gamifying education is when you use video games and techniques from video games to improve classroom experience, and Extra Credits has a phenomenal video on it. Here’s a quote from Anya Kamenetz, author of The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, but You Don't Have to Be: “Video-game-like assessments, such as those created by GlassLab and the AAA lab at Stanford, are designed to get at higher-order thinking skills. These games are designed to test things like systems thinking or the ability to take feedback - measures that traditional tests don't get at.” She does, however, note that Video-game-like assessments, quote “are still in their infancy.” If you liked this, you can follow me on all my socials! My username on everything is @alexunickel. And seriously, please check out Skillshare. They are amazing.
I think pbats/mms combined with what khan academy does with the stealth testing, and turning in both the portfolio of work and testing scores together, would get the best results for both education and measurements. Also there's nothing to stop a portfolio going to a college, after all, to get a Ph.D or whatever else, you need to write a Thesis or a Dissertation, both of which are about as far from standardized testing as you can get. The only thing it means is that the approval process for getting into college might take longer to process. combining this with stealth testing actually gives colleges more data because not only do they get basic scores, but they can see the actual quality of work, correct or not, and can thus judge: the rate at which a student learns, the level that learning peaked at, and the quality of student engagement (quality of work). if a student isn't engaged (low effort projects), if the student takes too long to improve to benefit from college in a reasonable period of time, Or their peak performance was below a threshold (currently the only thing tested for in general today), then those would be the flags to deny a student, and it could even be a case of requiring multiple red flags. For instance if they have high engagement and learn very quickly, but the peak of their learning was below average, that does not mean they are unfit for college, it simply means they might need to take a remedial course for something that's currently holding them back. as long as it takes multiple red-flags to deny enrollment, the number of enrolled students in college will go up, not down. All the while it becomes easier to learn and improve before that point. Worst case scenario, after graduating highschool and grades/tests/projects/portfolio to college to find out if you're accepted, there's about a year long wait, so you have a year without school to get... life experience, and learn how to be an adult, independent, etc. which would probably also be a good thing to take a year to do basically whatever. I found that I couldn't make it more than a summer because I was getting bored and I had to give myself a project to work on. which, though only one person isn't a trend, if it was a trend it would mean students would be practicing self directed projects and learning, which would... probably help figure out what they want to do with their lives... I mean, everyone's different and that won't work for everyone, a lot of people will probably just spend the year going "WOOO PARTY!!!!!" and forget everything they've learned, like teenagers are want to do. The only real problem I see is that for this to actually happen, you have to convince legislators, and to do that, it doesn't just need to be easy to understand, but generally it has to incur no additional costs. because it includes examining portfolios of work, colleges and employers would have to do additional work, which means additional hours worked and maybe even entirely new job positions at colleges, which means more money, more money into colleges means more money from the state, which means legislators don't like approving it. because there are so many examples of alternative education that are clearly more effective but not widespread I think is a sign that this is now the bottleneck. convincing legislators of a cost/benefit analysis.
The answers aren't in place because the government does not like change. Yes teachers and principals can make small changes, but if you really want to change your school's or district's testing system, you would have to go to the city council. :)
I love it when someone doesn't just go "This thing sucks!" but also add an "... and this is how we can make it better." It's so much more productive and insightful (not to mention less depressive).
The biggest issue with standardized tests I've found is definitely multiple choice. Most of my high scores are a result of basically guessing by eliminating the absolute wrong answers. As long as you can think quickly in the moment, you really don't need anything more than BASIC knowledge of the subject. I almost never studied. Took a dry run of the ASVAB, a military standardized test and scored I believe in the 96th percentile, and I know most of it was loosely educated guessing. I rushed through it just to get it done. I'm quick, sure, but I'm definitely not a genius. The time constraints are also flawed. Many people I've had experience with are often passed up as "deficient" mentally because it might take them minutes at a time to think something through. But it completely ignores their brilliance in the end. I've witnessed amazing solutions and clever viewpoints from people like this. People are just wired far too differently for all this jazz.
These are such good ideas! I wish they were implimented here in France (where I live and go to school) where standardised tests are a BIG deal. Like the Brevet at the end of middle school (9th grade/3ème). It just isn't a good way to unlock students potential. I appreciate you sharing ways things can be improved and already are improving in some places.😊 I love all your videos, by the way. I think this is one of my favorite chanels on TH-cam. They are always so informative and interesting. Thanks for being awesome and inspiring.
The idea of standardized testing is fine, to get an idea of different geographies and demographics quality of education etc. In Sweden we have "national tests" where it's not a choose-an-option test but instead freetext and they're graded by a human, not a computer. They're also not heavily tied to school funding etc. They test for understanding of subjects rather than memorizing facts - in English for example you're given a text to read then you get to answer a variety of questions about the text, like "explain why the man didn't buy the bike" and so on.
My high school chemistry teacher had a system where you could pick the percentage value of various parts of class work (homework, tests, projects, etc.)
My highschool chemistry teacher had a system where you either score well on his tests or he chased you in his car. On the plus side, our Track team was *amazing*.
Really great video Alex! I particularly like the idea of stealth testing, I know it doesn’t really solve the core problems, but it definitely takes out the stress and the concept of taking a class all year just to pass one test.
This is really an underrated TH-cam channel... Well made... Keep up with this and you might turn it into a great TH-cam channel... Support from India... 👊
this is one of the most important topics of all and i haven't even finished the vid and is one of the most well researched and beautifully done videos of this year. I'm literally creating a gmail to give u another sub. i love you and your videos.
Here from Nerdfighteria - subbed, belled, and I wish I could give to you on patreon. Your so much like Hank and John when they were younger. I know you have a bright future.
Super interesting video! I think it's really important to be having the discussion over how we can improve our school testing systems, so great job at adding to it so insightfully!
in Canada, standardized testing is regulated at the provincial level. in Alberta, at least when i went to school. you have one standardized test every 3 years (3,6,9,12) the rest of the years (starting from grade 7 anyway) is final exams created by the teachers. a more recent development is the weight of the diploma exam (grade 12 standardized test) went down from 50% to 30% of your final grade. there are also written portions for the english and social studies exams (the written portion of math and science was taken out a while ago unfortunately). i am not certain about the other provinces though, they may be different.
I spy Vsauce in the background. I'm new to your channel and I absolutely love it so far. Your videos are high quality and have a lot of production value.
I liked my old psychology class in college based on all essays : it was more of a gauge to how you understood the material even if you were able to go back to the book and reference it you still needed and understanding to finish the paper
In the UK we have a thing called Coursework and NEAs (non-examined assessments) for GCSEs. These, like you explained in the video, are bits of work that students can complete on their own time usually to get part of their final grade (for example engineering GCSE you have two bits of coursework that add up to be 60% of your final grade). Though, there is one issue; because these bits of work are not examined some students have been found out to of been cheating [by communicating their answers with other students] and unfairly getting a higher grade. This is shown in a recent example when the computer science GCSE was found to of been cheated on, more on that here www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-42144886, and they ended up just canceling the entire NEA/coursework for the computer science GCSE. Overall, I can see this system working only if the students take the tasks seriously and don't decide to cheat on them.
I was homeschooled in Florida and in order to stay legal, we had to make a school portfolio of all we had learned that year and have it evaluated by an official evaluator (just like how you described a Multiple-Measure System). Note: This wasn't the only way Florida homeschoolers could stay legal. Many take standardized tests just like public schoolers do.
Number 42's answer is 42. You think you're slick XD. I like the consortium schools' idea, I think humans are able to think better when we interact with the world around us. However, Khan academy is a great tool for studying and learning a new topic. P.S. I've been looking for this channel since I've watched your Hamilton Video (about a year, I'm not tech savvy) and now I'm so happy I found it again. Internally screaming for joy. :D
I really enjoyed this video. It's good to see "the youth" thinking deeply about matters of import. (And Hamilton. I found your channel through your "Inaccuracies in Hamilton" videos.) That said, not to be a Debbie Downer, but how would the Khan Academy approach work in a poor school district? The worst schools tend to be in urban areas in which parents don't have lots of disposable income for, say, a computer, while the funding for the district is too low to even provide the basic necessities of education, let alone computers for all. Where is the money for the computers going to come from? DFTBA!
6:00 So, this is basically where education has to go, AI driven assignments to keep track of exactly where your struggling and dynamic difficulty to keep you always mildly challenged but not easy mode or getting stuck, and you can't progress until you "get" it, so it guarantees everyone is on roughly the same page, and the teacher can tell at a glance who's struggling with what.
belgium, we do have standardized tests, but only once every 3 years. we, however, don't have any of the alternatives, or if we do it's highly school district specific.(a city with a population of 300.000 people has 5 districts). I don't see any issue with our school system, as we allegedly have on of the best in Europe. we do have 3 exam periods each school year, and they take up most of the tasks of the standardized test, just without the big data.
While the idea of adaptive learning methods like Khan Academy is good, I know from experience that Project-Based Learning was just as bad as several standardized tests when I had to go through them. If you wanted to consider the cons of standardized tests, we could say that they're stressful, discourage students who learn differently from others, and use tons of time for prep and test-taking time. Now compare that to PBLs, my high school's PBLs were the worst part of the year since for about 5 months of the schoolterm about 1-2 hours a day was spent working on these projects that the students had no say in, and they weren't short enough that you could just work hard through one to get to a fun one, my school gave ONE PBL assignment that was worth some 20-30% of your end grade for the class. They were extremely stressful for both students and teachers, were hard for me to do being someone who doesn't learn well in group projects, and as mentioned above took months to actually do. I know every school is different but the way my school did ours was made even worse because in one of our projects we were told to come up with a way to improve the city. The mayor showed up for our project presentations and all the work we did up until that point had to be done outside of class (only paper work in class time) where we were expected to cover the costs of meeting together and pay for every physical thing we needed to make our group prototype. Our parents bore the brunt of the costs since what Freshman has the money to build a working prototype for a project? So when you say that PBLs are a great alternative I have to disagree, they have the same major flaws as standardized testing but with even more stress in my experience.
Wow this is my first time visiting your channel - You do a really great job breaking down a complex issue. If I may make a small comment: Please speak a bit slower, especially when making important points, it will help us absorb the information you're giving. That said, keep going! You are the future and I so hope that you can run for office one day. Good luck and keep up the great work! Cheers!
school needs to be more focused on individual growth, the most important thing needs to not be what you learn but the experience(selective learning). It needs to be more focused about choosing your own classes/interests while possibly also having rotating classes to drive out possible interests. school needs to be the mold of development.
2 Big thoughts, and I'll admit to not having watched the entire video as closely as possible so if you addressed this I apologize: 1) Leaving things to a Khan Academy type program raises a big issue of student data and privacy concerns. Besides the issues you pointed out, I wouldn't want our test taking system to become even more privatized than it already is. We have a massive corporation responsible for one of the two big *state administered* tests, with Pearson being responsible for writing the PARCC. On top of that the SAT, ACT, GRE, CLEP... basically every acronym test...is run by some massive publishing corporation who is in it for money and has very little respect for student data. They actively use it promote and advertise effectively, not to mention sell books to a test that only they can see. Even teachers aren't allowed to see the tests when the students are taking them. Handing this over to yet another corporation or other entity (such as Khan Academy) is not exactly something I'd want either. There's also some pedagogical doubt as to whether Khan Academy's test are really that much better, but I could write an essay about that. 2) There's such a test that I think would solve this problem altogether, but it requires a bit of shift in thinking on the political end. Instead of trying to measure how effective the students are at taking a test. What if we evaluated teachers effectiveness in the classroom more directly? Frankly we do this already in some ways: Principals and Administrators are already required to do observations on teachers in most states, and that ensures that at least baseline of quality is met, as long as there are enough teachers to challenge the job market. With English/Humanities this tends to work a little better than Math/Science, because the people who can do those subjects have more incentive to go to a "real career" somewhere else (This is seriously what people say about my job, people ask why I would be a math teacher when I could get some other job, even though my job is far more important than what I could contribute to a shareholder's profit will ever be). Another way we could accomplish the above (in addition) is to use something like the Tripod survey. The tripod survey instead attempts to figure out how students are engaged in a classroom. So instead of having students prove they are learning exactly what is prescribed that year (which will still be happening! it's important to remember that different people are coming from different situations that may confound the results anyway!) They assess how the students perceive their teachers. We can then work to focus on helping the schools that need the most support in better engaging their populations, and instead of a stress to get something perfectly right, instead the intrinsic motivator is to be honest. If you are a student who is doing well, and your school experience is positive, you say everything is going great and that your teachers are reaching you. If you are student in a struggling school, you instead are honest and give word that things aren't so great, and that signals to the government that something isn't working right and that resources need to be directed that way. As long as this doesn't become a stick over the teachers head (get such scores or get fired), teachers will want students to be honest too, if things are hard, a student being honest means you get more resources, not less. There's another benefit too! The TRIPOD survey correlates strongly with our existing tests! Which despite not being a particularly good measure, does have some utility in the extremes. Anyway, I think about this stuff way too much and this is a 3 week old video, but I'm really confident we could solve the standardized testing issue by making a big culture shift in a couple bigger states. It will definitely take a generation to swing, we'll see if us Millenials/Gen Z's can get this fixed by the time their kids are in high school.
Consider yourself subscribed to. (And yes, I come from scishow. Physics Girl made you look too young and boring to be worth checking out at that time, but you're actually awesome.)
Hey Technicality! Glad my comment was one of your favorites from last video ;) Would you be interested in doing some sort of collaboration? I'd love to work together, not quite sure what that might look like though. Our videos are in the same sphere of YT. Apart from that, keep your videos coming. I use and have used your videos a ton for articles I work on (I'm the former editor of Interesting Engineering and I now work for Autodesk). Have a great day!
Lol binged your videos a while back and then I was swallowed by my fandoms. *cough* Voltron *cough* Just found you again and here goes another binge! P.S. like wow, you are still attractive. Usually things go downhill once the channel starts thriving lol. Never stop being your cute intellectual self!
Technically it's "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and then "Great Britain" is comprised of "England, Wales and Scotland". I've a feeling that perhaps the phrasing he was looking for was "Scotland ... and England & Wales". But due to "and" with "&" you'd likely want to phrase it something like "This is used in England & Wales, along with ..., Scotland, and ...". He also could have just said "in Great Britain" for all three, but I've a feeling he was trying to delineate that Scotland has its own separate system, even if using the same methodology in this context.
Ath Athanasius yer they do have different laws scotland (in USA terms) is like another state with slight difference in laws. And yer he could of just said he uk or Britain
Standardized tests are better predictors of the results of performance-based assessments than performance-based assessments are of each other, so replacing standardized tests with performance-based assessments is clearly ill-advised. As supplements to standardized tests they are a good idea...provided they are reliable and valid. The ideas of reliability and validity are missing from your two videos on this topic, although they are crucial considerations in test design. A test should be internally consistent and give similar results in repeated testing, and it should predict other measures of the ability it claims to be measuring. Have your proposed alternatives been shown to be reliable and valid? Of course, you do raise the question of the validity of standardized tests -- the correlation between math and language scores -- and you are entirely right to do so. This is a serious shortcoming of standardized tests, but at least it's known. I suspect the psychometric evidence for the reliability and validity of many of your proposed alternatives is either non-existent or negative. In the end I guess the difference between you and me is that I don't see the utility of replacing standardized tests. Their psychometric characteristics are known and understood, and they are more effective than other measures. Supplementing them with other reliable and valid measures seems a better idea to me -- statistically, that approach must make assessments more accurate.
Great video! But be very careful about making sure to mention the limitations of the statistics you use. Not all data can be extrapolated well, especially when that data comes from a different region.
I might agree if I wasn’t so good at tests. If we replace tests with project-based assessment, classic smart-lazy types will get screwed over and left behind. At least with our current testing system, you can’t really fail as long as you know the material. Khan academy doesn’t have this problem, and I guess is a fine system. The only problem is it would make my test scores meaningless :(
Anything where a test is a chance to learn and grow your skills and competencies (like with Khan Academy) instead of just a way to assess how much of the random/useless knowledge you are able to cram into your brain seems great to me. I think the whole school system in general is not the most effective or efficient way of learning necessary skills. I'm glad that there are some ways that this is being fixed. You generally don't get taught the things you need to know for every day life and instead get taught information you could find with a simple Google search. I wish school would teach me how to pay taxes, or what the laws of my country are, or anything else like that. You would think in the eight hours a day, five days a week they would be able to make time for things like teaching us how to do basic daily tasks (such as driving, maybe) but instead we get taught the Pythagorian Theorem. Which I understand why you might need to know if you were to become an engineer but if I really needed to know how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle I could just look it up. Times are changing and resources are changing, so should along with it's standardised testing to teach people useful and helpful skills like logic and reasoning. Anyways, I hope you all have an amazing day!😊
We need a worldwide complete overhaul of education content and systems. After 16 years of learning, people are still not able to do basic jobs. There is too much random information that serves no purpose. If you are doing a degree in a specific field, at least 80% of the work has nothing to do with that subject or is outdated. But because it has always been done this way, it just continues. It has become a money making scheme.
Also i think the only multiple choice test i ever took was the entrance test for my private high school. We (ie scotland) also had tests like maths where you had to show your working, so if you got the wrong answer overall from an early error they'd catch that and just mark you down one point. If it was multiple choice you would lose out completely...
I have a pretty good idea for how the tests should be laid out... Take Japan’s ideas. Take the UK’s ideas. They’re perfectly fine. (Please don’t take this seriously. At least not until brexit has ended and Trump isn’t president. Help the economy. Please.)
hearing you mispronounce 'consortium' again and again hurts my soul. Con sort e um. there might be a Heteronym of consortium that means something else and is pronounced the way you are (since a google search of the word gives 2 pronunciations, with the consort-e-um pronunciation first, and your pronunciation second, but ALSO gives two different definitions, which makes me suspect it's actually supposed to be two different words, like tear and tear. I have literally always heard the organizations that are consortiums pronounced with a T, rather than an SH. and this just.... this just really bothers me and I don't know why. Like I had to pause the video after you said it a second time to check how consortium is pronounced and it's definition, and re-learn what a heteronym is rather than homophone or homonym or any of the others that are a tangled mess of which is which, just so that I could make this comment. I don't know why this upsets me quite this much, this is worse than gif.
What are your thoughts on the solutions? Which one is your favourite? Is there a good one I didn't cover? Let me know in the comments!
*CUT FOR TIME:*
_I cut this bit on gamifying education:_
Moreover, Khan Academy gamified education by rewarding energy points after each quiz. A matter of fact, gamifying education is another aspect of stealth assessments that work great! Gamifying education is when you use video games and techniques from video games to improve classroom experience, and Extra Credits has a phenomenal video on it.
Here’s a quote from Anya Kamenetz, author of The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, but You Don't Have to Be: “Video-game-like assessments, such as those created by GlassLab and the AAA lab at Stanford, are designed to get at higher-order thinking skills. These games are designed to test things like systems thinking or the ability to take feedback - measures that traditional tests don't get at.” She does, however, note that Video-game-like assessments, quote “are still in their infancy.”
If you liked this, you can follow me on all my socials! My username on everything is @alexunickel. And seriously, please check out Skillshare. They are amazing.
I think pbats/mms combined with what khan academy does with the stealth testing, and turning in both the portfolio of work and testing scores together, would get the best results for both education and measurements. Also there's nothing to stop a portfolio going to a college, after all, to get a Ph.D or whatever else, you need to write a Thesis or a Dissertation, both of which are about as far from standardized testing as you can get. The only thing it means is that the approval process for getting into college might take longer to process. combining this with stealth testing actually gives colleges more data because not only do they get basic scores, but they can see the actual quality of work, correct or not, and can thus judge: the rate at which a student learns, the level that learning peaked at, and the quality of student engagement (quality of work). if a student isn't engaged (low effort projects), if the student takes too long to improve to benefit from college in a reasonable period of time, Or their peak performance was below a threshold (currently the only thing tested for in general today), then those would be the flags to deny a student, and it could even be a case of requiring multiple red flags. For instance if they have high engagement and learn very quickly, but the peak of their learning was below average, that does not mean they are unfit for college, it simply means they might need to take a remedial course for something that's currently holding them back. as long as it takes multiple red-flags to deny enrollment, the number of enrolled students in college will go up, not down. All the while it becomes easier to learn and improve before that point.
Worst case scenario, after graduating highschool and grades/tests/projects/portfolio to college to find out if you're accepted, there's about a year long wait, so you have a year without school to get... life experience, and learn how to be an adult, independent, etc. which would probably also be a good thing to take a year to do basically whatever. I found that I couldn't make it more than a summer because I was getting bored and I had to give myself a project to work on. which, though only one person isn't a trend, if it was a trend it would mean students would be practicing self directed projects and learning, which would... probably help figure out what they want to do with their lives... I mean, everyone's different and that won't work for everyone, a lot of people will probably just spend the year going "WOOO PARTY!!!!!" and forget everything they've learned, like teenagers are want to do.
The only real problem I see is that for this to actually happen, you have to convince legislators, and to do that, it doesn't just need to be easy to understand, but generally it has to incur no additional costs. because it includes examining portfolios of work, colleges and employers would have to do additional work, which means additional hours worked and maybe even entirely new job positions at colleges, which means more money, more money into colleges means more money from the state, which means legislators don't like approving it. because there are so many examples of alternative education that are clearly more effective but not widespread I think is a sign that this is now the bottleneck. convincing legislators of a cost/benefit analysis.
Hi, it's your cousin.Emory,I made a TH-cam Channel check it put Pls.
Emory Everything hi Emory it’s your cousin, Keven
Honestly, we are a point where we have answers but aren’t using them. please send this to all your teachers and principals for the better good!
The answers aren't in place because the government does not like change. Yes teachers and principals can make small changes, but if you really want to change your school's or district's testing system, you would have to go to the city council. :)
You are one hundred percent correct!
City council has nothing to do with this. You want to go to the state legislature.
I love it when someone doesn't just go "This thing sucks!" but also add an "... and this is how we can make it better." It's so much more productive and insightful (not to mention less depressive).
Found you through the sponsored video on SciShow. Keep up the good work, man. I wish I had my act together this much at 16. Kudos.
The biggest issue with standardized tests I've found is definitely multiple choice. Most of my high scores are a result of basically guessing by eliminating the absolute wrong answers. As long as you can think quickly in the moment, you really don't need anything more than BASIC knowledge of the subject. I almost never studied.
Took a dry run of the ASVAB, a military standardized test and scored I believe in the 96th percentile, and I know most of it was loosely educated guessing. I rushed through it just to get it done. I'm quick, sure, but I'm definitely not a genius.
The time constraints are also flawed. Many people I've had experience with are often passed up as "deficient" mentally because it might take them minutes at a time to think something through. But it completely ignores their brilliance in the end. I've witnessed amazing solutions and clever viewpoints from people like this. People are just wired far too differently for all this jazz.
Watching this video as an Australian was surreal, because I kept hearing systems that I take for granted.
These are such good ideas! I wish they were implimented here in France (where I live and go to school) where standardised tests are a BIG deal. Like the Brevet at the end of middle school (9th grade/3ème). It just isn't a good way to unlock students potential. I appreciate you sharing ways things can be improved and already are improving in some places.😊 I love all your videos, by the way. I think this is one of my favorite chanels on TH-cam. They are always so informative and interesting. Thanks for being awesome and inspiring.
I've been watching your videos for a while and I really love how your style has progressed over time. Keep up the amazing work!
Another video from Technicality, alright let's get the popcorn!
just got back from SXSW EDU & this was hands down the hottest topic. Great vid man.
The idea of standardized testing is fine, to get an idea of different geographies and demographics quality of education etc.
In Sweden we have "national tests" where it's not a choose-an-option test but instead freetext and they're graded by a human, not a computer. They're also not heavily tied to school funding etc. They test for understanding of subjects rather than memorizing facts - in English for example you're given a text to read then you get to answer a variety of questions about the text, like "explain why the man didn't buy the bike" and so on.
My high school chemistry teacher had a system where you could pick the percentage value of various parts of class work (homework, tests, projects, etc.)
David Lev Thank you for this idea! I am a high school biology teacher, and love how much it engages students in their own learning!
My highschool chemistry teacher had a system where you either score well on his tests or he chased you in his car.
On the plus side, our Track team was *amazing*.
Really great video Alex! I particularly like the idea of stealth testing, I know it doesn’t really solve the core problems, but it definitely takes out the stress and the concept of taking a class all year just to pass one test.
This is really an underrated TH-cam channel... Well made... Keep up with this and you might turn it into a great TH-cam channel...
Support from India... 👊
Dude, I found you from a sic show shoutout- and you are my new favorite youtuber
this is one of the most important topics of all and i haven't even finished the vid and is one of the most well researched and beautifully done videos of this year. I'm literally creating a gmail to give u another sub. i love you and your videos.
Here from Nerdfighteria - subbed, belled, and I wish I could give to you on patreon. Your so much like Hank and John when they were younger. I know you have a bright future.
Super interesting video! I think it's really important to be having the discussion over how we can improve our school testing systems, so great job at adding to it so insightfully!
in Canada, standardized testing is regulated at the provincial level. in Alberta, at least when i went to school. you have one standardized test every 3 years (3,6,9,12) the rest of the years (starting from grade 7 anyway) is final exams created by the teachers. a more recent development is the weight of the diploma exam (grade 12 standardized test) went down from 50% to 30% of your final grade. there are also written portions for the english and social studies exams (the written portion of math and science was taken out a while ago unfortunately). i am not certain about the other provinces though, they may be different.
Great video. This channel is going places!
I spy Vsauce in the background.
I'm new to your channel and I absolutely love it so far. Your videos are high quality and have a lot of production value.
I liked my old psychology class in college based on all essays : it was more of a gauge to how you understood the material even if you were able to go back to the book and reference it you still needed and understanding to finish the paper
I love your videos!!!! I understand a lot of these problems - surprising to hear things are better here in the UK than the US.
0:08
Wooo hitchhikers reference
also thanks for recommending Brooklyn 99 in that cocoa nib video, because I literally can't stop watching it now
In the UK we have a thing called Coursework and NEAs (non-examined assessments) for GCSEs. These, like you explained in the video, are bits of work that students can complete on their own time usually to get part of their final grade (for example engineering GCSE you have two bits of coursework that add up to be 60% of your final grade).
Though, there is one issue; because these bits of work are not examined some students have been found out to of been cheating [by communicating their answers with other students] and unfairly getting a higher grade. This is shown in a recent example when the computer science GCSE was found to of been cheated on, more on that here www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-42144886, and they ended up just canceling the entire NEA/coursework for the computer science GCSE.
Overall, I can see this system working only if the students take the tasks seriously and don't decide to cheat on them.
I was homeschooled in Florida and in order to stay legal, we had to make a school portfolio of all we had learned that year and have it evaluated by an official evaluator (just like how you described a Multiple-Measure System). Note: This wasn't the only way Florida homeschoolers could stay legal. Many take standardized tests just like public schoolers do.
Great content man!
Number 42's answer is 42. You think you're slick XD. I like the consortium schools' idea, I think humans are able to think better when we interact with the world around us. However, Khan academy is a great tool for studying and learning a new topic.
P.S. I've been looking for this channel since I've watched your Hamilton Video (about a year, I'm not tech savvy) and now I'm so happy I found it again. Internally screaming for joy. :D
Here from SciShow! This is fantastic!
I really enjoyed this video. It's good to see "the youth" thinking deeply about matters of import. (And Hamilton. I found your channel through your "Inaccuracies in Hamilton" videos.)
That said, not to be a Debbie Downer, but how would the Khan Academy approach work in a poor school district? The worst schools tend to be in urban areas in which parents don't have lots of disposable income for, say, a computer, while the funding for the district is too low to even provide the basic necessities of education, let alone computers for all. Where is the money for the computers going to come from?
DFTBA!
6:00
So, this is basically where education has to go, AI driven assignments to keep track of exactly where your struggling and dynamic difficulty to keep you always mildly challenged but not easy mode or getting stuck, and you can't progress until you "get" it, so it guarantees everyone is on roughly the same page, and the teacher can tell at a glance who's struggling with what.
Fantastic ad. Keep up the clever placement
Scotland is part of the UK 😂 They haven't left yet.
ahaha yup yea just realized that
But education in Scotland is different to, say, England in both the system of teaching and the qualifications gained
belgium, we do have standardized tests, but only once every 3 years.
we, however, don't have any of the alternatives, or if we do it's highly school district specific.(a city with a population of 300.000 people has 5 districts). I don't see any issue with our school system, as we allegedly have on of the best in Europe. we do have 3 exam periods each school year, and they take up most of the tasks of the standardized test, just without the big data.
5:48 was that a reference to the sound/voices in the Khan Academy videos?
Scishow sent me here. Nice video, good job!
Very interesting... I came here from SciShow and subbed.
While the idea of adaptive learning methods like Khan Academy is good, I know from experience that Project-Based Learning was just as bad as several standardized tests when I had to go through them. If you wanted to consider the cons of standardized tests, we could say that they're stressful, discourage students who learn differently from others, and use tons of time for prep and test-taking time. Now compare that to PBLs, my high school's PBLs were the worst part of the year since for about 5 months of the schoolterm about 1-2 hours a day was spent working on these projects that the students had no say in, and they weren't short enough that you could just work hard through one to get to a fun one, my school gave ONE PBL assignment that was worth some 20-30% of your end grade for the class. They were extremely stressful for both students and teachers, were hard for me to do being someone who doesn't learn well in group projects, and as mentioned above took months to actually do. I know every school is different but the way my school did ours was made even worse because in one of our projects we were told to come up with a way to improve the city. The mayor showed up for our project presentations and all the work we did up until that point had to be done outside of class (only paper work in class time) where we were expected to cover the costs of meeting together and pay for every physical thing we needed to make our group prototype. Our parents bore the brunt of the costs since what Freshman has the money to build a working prototype for a project? So when you say that PBLs are a great alternative I have to disagree, they have the same major flaws as standardized testing but with even more stress in my experience.
Wow this is my first time visiting your channel - You do a really great job breaking down a complex issue. If I may make a small comment: Please speak a bit slower, especially when making important points, it will help us absorb the information you're giving.
That said, keep going! You are the future and I so hope that you can run for office one day. Good luck and keep up the great work!
Cheers!
New sub from SciShow!
I actually hate the way the UK does tests. We only have one or two main tests per subject which is really stressful.
Eddy Burback?? What?? That's nuts!!
Oooh! That's hot! That's real hot!
Spicy! 😂 Great video again as always by the way
school needs to be more focused on individual growth, the most important thing needs to not be what you learn but the experience(selective learning). It needs to be more focused about choosing your own classes/interests while possibly also having rotating classes to drive out possible interests. school needs to be the mold of development.
SciShow brought me here. Great channel! :D
Great video.
2 Big thoughts, and I'll admit to not having watched the entire video as closely as possible so if you addressed this I apologize:
1) Leaving things to a Khan Academy type program raises a big issue of student data and privacy concerns. Besides the issues you pointed out, I wouldn't want our test taking system to become even more privatized than it already is. We have a massive corporation responsible for one of the two big *state administered* tests, with Pearson being responsible for writing the PARCC. On top of that the SAT, ACT, GRE, CLEP... basically every acronym test...is run by some massive publishing corporation who is in it for money and has very little respect for student data. They actively use it promote and advertise effectively, not to mention sell books to a test that only they can see. Even teachers aren't allowed to see the tests when the students are taking them. Handing this over to yet another corporation or other entity (such as Khan Academy) is not exactly something I'd want either. There's also some pedagogical doubt as to whether Khan Academy's test are really that much better, but I could write an essay about that.
2) There's such a test that I think would solve this problem altogether, but it requires a bit of shift in thinking on the political end. Instead of trying to measure how effective the students are at taking a test. What if we evaluated teachers effectiveness in the classroom more directly? Frankly we do this already in some ways: Principals and Administrators are already required to do observations on teachers in most states, and that ensures that at least baseline of quality is met, as long as there are enough teachers to challenge the job market. With English/Humanities this tends to work a little better than Math/Science, because the people who can do those subjects have more incentive to go to a "real career" somewhere else (This is seriously what people say about my job, people ask why I would be a math teacher when I could get some other job, even though my job is far more important than what I could contribute to a shareholder's profit will ever be).
Another way we could accomplish the above (in addition) is to use something like the Tripod survey. The tripod survey instead attempts to figure out how students are engaged in a classroom. So instead of having students prove they are learning exactly what is prescribed that year (which will still be happening! it's important to remember that different people are coming from different situations that may confound the results anyway!) They assess how the students perceive their teachers. We can then work to focus on helping the schools that need the most support in better engaging their populations, and instead of a stress to get something perfectly right, instead the intrinsic motivator is to be honest. If you are a student who is doing well, and your school experience is positive, you say everything is going great and that your teachers are reaching you. If you are student in a struggling school, you instead are honest and give word that things aren't so great, and that signals to the government that something isn't working right and that resources need to be directed that way. As long as this doesn't become a stick over the teachers head (get such scores or get fired), teachers will want students to be honest too, if things are hard, a student being honest means you get more resources, not less.
There's another benefit too! The TRIPOD survey correlates strongly with our existing tests! Which despite not being a particularly good measure, does have some utility in the extremes.
Anyway, I think about this stuff way too much and this is a 3 week old video, but I'm really confident we could solve the standardized testing issue by making a big culture shift in a couple bigger states. It will definitely take a generation to swing, we'll see if us Millenials/Gen Z's can get this fixed by the time their kids are in high school.
Consider yourself subscribed to.
(And yes, I come from scishow. Physics Girl made you look too young and boring to be worth checking out at that time, but you're actually awesome.)
Bruh he speaks so clear and fast how many takes do you do per shot?
7:07 Yay! You also like Eddy Burback!
Man thats impressive, you always deliver quality content. Love from india❤ .
Can you please increase the audio next time? thank you! Loved the video.
Hey Technicality! Glad my comment was one of your favorites from last video ;) Would you be interested in doing some sort of collaboration? I'd love to work together, not quite sure what that might look like though. Our videos are in the same sphere of YT. Apart from that, keep your videos coming. I use and have used your videos a ton for articles I work on (I'm the former editor of Interesting Engineering and I now work for Autodesk). Have a great day!
came here because of SciSchow, good quality videos. subscribed.
Lol binged your videos a while back and then I was swallowed by my fandoms. *cough* Voltron *cough* Just found you again and here goes another binge!
P.S. like wow, you are still attractive. Usually things go downhill once the channel starts thriving lol. Never stop being your cute intellectual self!
2:47 ps Scotland is the uk like United Kingdom of Scotland England and north an Ireland
thomas bear *northern Ireland
Technically it's "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and then "Great Britain" is comprised of "England, Wales and Scotland".
I've a feeling that perhaps the phrasing he was looking for was "Scotland ... and England & Wales". But due to "and" with "&" you'd likely want to phrase it something like "This is used in England & Wales, along with ..., Scotland, and ...".
He also could have just said "in Great Britain" for all three, but I've a feeling he was trying to delineate that Scotland has its own separate system, even if using the same methodology in this context.
Ath Athanasius yer they do have different laws scotland (in USA terms) is like another state with slight difference in laws. And yer he could of just said he uk or Britain
Although this is true, here in Scotland we have a different educational system than the rest of the UK
Chewy true but has he done that much reaserch
Watched my first video of yours, 10 things Hamilton got wrong. I was extremely shocked with the voice change when I clicked on this video.
Heyyyy! SciShow sent me here. I subbed and all and like what i saw so far, but ... good sir ... please don't forget to breathe now and then. :p
australia is moving towards standardised testing unfortunately...
Good luck with all he new subs (Sci-Show shout out)
You deserve more credit than you get
Standardized tests are better predictors of the results of performance-based assessments than performance-based assessments are of each other, so replacing standardized tests with performance-based assessments is clearly ill-advised. As supplements to standardized tests they are a good idea...provided they are reliable and valid.
The ideas of reliability and validity are missing from your two videos on this topic, although they are crucial considerations in test design. A test should be internally consistent and give similar results in repeated testing, and it should predict other measures of the ability it claims to be measuring. Have your proposed alternatives been shown to be reliable and valid?
Of course, you do raise the question of the validity of standardized tests -- the correlation between math and language scores -- and you are entirely right to do so. This is a serious shortcoming of standardized tests, but at least it's known. I suspect the psychometric evidence for the reliability and validity of many of your proposed alternatives is either non-existent or negative.
In the end I guess the difference between you and me is that I don't see the utility of replacing standardized tests. Their psychometric characteristics are known and understood, and they are more effective than other measures. Supplementing them with other reliable and valid measures seems a better idea to me -- statistically, that approach must make assessments more accurate.
Great video! But be very careful about making sure to mention the limitations of the statistics you use. Not all data can be extrapolated well, especially when that data comes from a different region.
I took the SAT today
I might agree if I wasn’t so good at tests. If we replace tests with project-based assessment, classic smart-lazy types will get screwed over and left behind. At least with our current testing system, you can’t really fail as long as you know the material.
Khan academy doesn’t have this problem, and I guess is a fine system. The only problem is it would make my test scores meaningless :(
I also like how you don’t cut out the part where you shove your face in the camera to zoom out 😂
Anything where a test is a chance to learn and grow your skills and competencies (like with Khan Academy) instead of just a way to assess how much of the random/useless knowledge you are able to cram into your brain seems great to me. I think the whole school system in general is not the most effective or efficient way of learning necessary skills. I'm glad that there are some ways that this is being fixed. You generally don't get taught the things you need to know for every day life and instead get taught information you could find with a simple Google search. I wish school would teach me how to pay taxes, or what the laws of my country are, or anything else like that. You would think in the eight hours a day, five days a week they would be able to make time for things like teaching us how to do basic daily tasks (such as driving, maybe) but instead we get taught the Pythagorian Theorem. Which I understand why you might need to know if you were to become an engineer but if I really needed to know how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle I could just look it up. Times are changing and resources are changing, so should along with it's standardised testing to teach people useful and helpful skills like logic and reasoning. Anyways, I hope you all have an amazing day!😊
We need a worldwide complete overhaul of education content and systems. After 16 years of learning, people are still not able to do basic jobs. There is too much random information that serves no purpose. If you are doing a degree in a specific field, at least 80% of the work has nothing to do with that subject or is outdated. But because it has always been done this way, it just continues. It has become a money making scheme.
Alex alex alex alex ALEX!
what's up with the camera spin X)
it's not that bad but I can't un-notice it
still, great video anyway
Kinda remind me of Barry Allen 🤓✊great video hope to see more
don't stop making videos
Scotland..... and the UK. Ok...
(Seriously though it just surprises me that you don't have essay grades counting in the us)
Also i think the only multiple choice test i ever took was the entrance test for my private high school. We (ie scotland) also had tests like maths where you had to show your working, so if you got the wrong answer overall from an early error they'd catch that and just mark you down one point. If it was multiple choice you would lose out completely...
If only educators would listen to this...
Nice Bojack Horseman reference
Bojack fan! ♥️
If I had it my way with the school system, I would just look at school grades and implement khan academy instead of standardized tests.
I love standardized testing! I always get 99% because my state won't let me get any more than that.
singaporean here and our schools are still using really standardised way of evaluating students.. ._.
Straight from scishow.
A solution that requires high speed internet access at home is not biased toward rich kids?
Wo, your voice dropped since the last time i watched your video.
Oh hey check it out! I'm in a SciShow video: th-cam.com/video/6I9tenSb-Zg/w-d-xo.html
#SpicyStatistics
Have you considered that not all kids have adequate internet access at home.
Standardized testing is just one tiny facet of how messed up our schools are.
What is it like being so cool?
OK I'm Australian and holy fuck i didnt know that all of americans grades came from tests. Thats fucking bullshit
From Scishow
hi
Uhm... what is standardized testing?
Where did you go to school
I need to be as smart as you
i too am a child of burback
BOOOOJAAAAAACKKKKKK :DDDDDDD
i am verry erly
Yeah....that thing about the uk.....not any more, thanks conservatives, boy do I love this new gcse system
But I agree completely with your point
I have a pretty good idea for how the tests should be laid out...
Take Japan’s ideas. Take the UK’s ideas. They’re perfectly fine.
(Please don’t take this seriously. At least not until brexit has ended and Trump isn’t president. Help the economy. Please.)
Notice.
U talk funny. No offense lol, its cute.
hearing you mispronounce 'consortium' again and again hurts my soul. Con sort e um. there might be a Heteronym of consortium that means something else and is pronounced the way you are (since a google search of the word gives 2 pronunciations, with the consort-e-um pronunciation first, and your pronunciation second, but ALSO gives two different definitions, which makes me suspect it's actually supposed to be two different words, like tear and tear.
I have literally always heard the organizations that are consortiums pronounced with a T, rather than an SH. and this just.... this just really bothers me and I don't know why. Like I had to pause the video after you said it a second time to check how consortium is pronounced and it's definition, and re-learn what a heteronym is rather than homophone or homonym or any of the others that are a tangled mess of which is which, just so that I could make this comment. I don't know why this upsets me quite this much, this is worse than gif.