Why Are We Giving Students Public Goals for Standardized Assessments?

Let's talk about having students set goals for their performance on standardized benchmark assessments.

This is something I'm seeing more and more.

And when I was a principal, we administered MAP.

And I know MAP from NWEA is a very popular benchmark assessment.

There are lots of others, iReady, and there are lots of vendors that offer it.

benchmark assessments to help measure student progress in kind of a standardized way.

But I'm noticing that a lot of schools, especially schools where maybe student achievement is lower, are having students set goals or they're setting goals for students and they're communicating those goals to students in the form of a score that they want them to get.

And I saw this example a couple months back of an administrator who was really trying to encourage students to do their best and to work hard and to really try to get their scores up.

But it occurred to me right away that this is a massive FERPA violation.

So I have to say, if you're having students set goals, please don't embarrass them.

Please don't make those scores public.

Please don't make the goals public.

Please don't write students' scores on their lockers.

This is a...

clear violation of FERPA.

And of course, just very embarrassing to the students to see those different scores up there.

So we owe students the dignity of privacy.

But I also wonder if there's even any value in having students set goals at all, because this is the kind of test that you can't study for.

These are benchmark assessments.

It's not like you get a study packet and you go home and you get ready for the test and then you ace it or not.

These are standardized assessments that the teachers don't even get to see.

These are things you take on the computer.

You get maybe some since or reports that have some detail about what areas of kids did well and what areas they didn't do so well in.

But these are not the kinds of tests that you can study for or really work toward.

And I think when we have students set goals, we need to make sure that those are goals that they can actually work toward.

Like effort needs to be directly valuable in achieving that goal.

And when it comes to standardized test scores, effort can determine how well you do on a test compared to a student who doesn't try as hard.

So I think effort is worth emphasizing.

But I really see no value in giving students a score to strive for as if they know what that means or as if there's something specific that they can do to achieve that score.

So let me know what you think about this.

Let me know what your school is doing around those benchmark assessments where students get a score and then they have goals that are identified for them.

And what does your school do?

to encourage students to do their best on those assessments.

Like, obviously, we want to know what students are learning.

We want to have some sort of gauge of student progress.

But we don't want to engage in these kind of voodoo practices where we say, as long as we go through this goal-setting ritual, then we're going to see better results.

I think we have to actually think, is this goal-setting process logically going to lead to better results for students?

Let me know what you think.