AIMS Writing Test Update

April 17th, 2009 by Brian Leave a reply »

An e-mail coming across today quoted Tom Horne looking at cutting the AIMS Writing test for 4th, 5th, and 8th grades in light of the budget crisis. This is an interesting move, because those essays need graders and now we save on materials as well as paying people to grade the essays. Now it will be just Scantron.

Some drawbacks, though, are that some students do poorly on Scantron. Also, will writing not be assessed for those three years? We also need to make sure that we don’t just teach to the test – even though 8th graders will not be AIMS-tested, they’ll still need to work on their writing to be able to survive in the academic world (and eventually the world outside of school).

The test will still be there for the other grades. I think it’ll work, especially at cutting some costs, but when we’ve conditioned ourselves to focus ourselves so subconsciously towards the AIMS, we need to remind ourselves that people wrote long before the AIMS test.

We’ll see if this proposal becomes official on April 27.

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1 comment

  1. Concerned Teacher says:

    What amazes me about the legislature and its proposed cuts is that they continue to compare us with foreign countries. Perhaps education is a higher priority in those countries. The positions in their secondary and higher levels are definitely coveted spots. Are those countries holding their teachers accountable with a test similar to AIMS? How can we justify the costs of administrating AIMS when that money could easily go toward being able to keep quality teachers, staff, and administrators? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to test two years at a time and skip the alternate year?

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