On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:34, Kevin Cole <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 21:12, Caroline Meeks > <[email protected]> wrote: >> This is a simple, yet powerful idea of tracking student progress in real >> time and trying different interventions to see what works. >> I give a brief three minute description >> here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI95fgBnJWI >> There is a great deal on the web about RTI but everything I have seen in >> class or on the web is US. I'm wondering if maybe a similar concept is >> being used under a different name else where? > > Peripherally related (I think): About 25 years ago, as part of our > re-norming of the Stanford Achievement Test > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Achievement_Test_Series) for > deaf students across the US, we added a new feature. We obtained the > source code to a a program known as "SPP: Student Problem Package". > See the reference here: > > http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED298133&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED298133 > > The version we obtained was, as I recall, not for the IBM PC but > rather for the PDP-11, and I was responsible for porting it to the > DECsystem-10. In the process, I was asked to whittle it down a bit. > My memory's rusty but the thing that struck me as useful about the > program was that it would look at a class's performance on a test and > show how many students answered question 1 with "A", how many answered > "B", etc. with a primative graph and other statistics. At a glance, > you could determine if several students were sharing the same > mis-understanding (or I suppose, cheating, but that wasn't the point). > The idea was both to identify problems in comprehension, and badly > formed questions. > > A classic funny example that came up in our design of "pre-tests" for > deaf students to determine the the appropriate level of the test to > give to each child. One of Stanford's "throw-away" questions > consisted of a "read the paragraph and answer the questions". In this > case it was a short letter on the fridge from "Mom and Dad" to "Sally > and Jimmy" saying that they'd be late getting home, and gave a list of > tasks for the children to perform. One of those tasks was to remember > to "play ball with Buster". > > In the question section, one of the questions was something like: > > Buster is: > (a) a dog > (b) a cat > (c) a hamster > (d) none of the above > > A surprising number of kids in our pilot answered (c), presumably > because both words ended with "ster". However, it lead our office to > visions of a terrified little animal being tossed between two > children... > > Anyway, considering SPP's age, it has probably evolved into something > entirely different, if it hasn't died completely. But at the time, it > seemed quite good. (I don't recall why we dropped that for later > editions of the Stanford reports we produce.)
P.S. After a bit of digging, I turned up a page on Del Harnish, the brain behind SPP. http://cehs15.unl.edu/fsinfo/cehs_pull.php?UserName=dharnisch&Department=Teaching%2C+Learning+and+Teacher+Education&; -- Ubuntu Linux DC LoCo Washington, DC http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/ _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
