> Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions:
- Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff?
- Who decides the difficulty?
- How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep?
- Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average?
If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions.
I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.
Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions:
- Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff?
- Who decides the difficulty?
- How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep?
- Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average?
If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions.
I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.