Word: ackerman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Philadelphia, superintendent Arlene Ackerman instituted a Parent University this year after expressing concern over low literacy rates for parents and children, as well as a general lack of parental engagement among low-income families, especially among African-American men. Tasked with cherry-picking the best elements from other programs around the country (and tossing the worst), Karren Dunkley, deputy of the Philadelphia School District's Office of Parent, Family and Community Services, and her colleagues realized that they needed to ground the program within the context of adult continuing education. That is, if you're trying to teach adults something...
...range of the scores was from about 800 to 1,600," says Ackerman. "[But] within the study, lower-scoring examinees were not more or less affected by longer test lengths than higher-scoring examinees." (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
...possibility," Ackerman says, "is that more students respond to feelings of fatigue by increasing rather than decreasing their efforts." This, however, could reveal a flaw in the study. By limiting the sample group to college freshman, the researchers did not get a look at an entire category of kids: those who took the SAT in high school, did poorly, and never went on with their education. There's no way of knowing whether achievement motivation was absent in those students or whether they redoubled their efforts too, but got low scores for other reasons...
...uncommon for commercial groups to bankroll research that bears directly on their business; pharmaceutical companies fund drug trials all the time, for example. No matter how rigorously the research is conducted, however, the risk always exists that researchers' objectivity may be tainted by their backers' agenda. But Ackerman insists this is not a concern with his and Kanfer's work. The data from the study, he says, remained the property of Georgia Tech, not the College Board, and the two groups signed a contract in advance in which the school retained the rights to publish the results no matter what...
...study is to be believed and students do perfectly well in a test that runs five-plus hours, what is the practical limit? Six? Seven? Twelve? We may never know. "Testing beyond 5.5 to six hours is not practical," says Ackerman, "because examinees would need a break of significant time to eat. It's an open question whether eight or more hours with a lunch break would result in poorer performance." For now, high school students dreading the SAT probably don't have to worry that the test is going to get longer. But it's not likely...