\”It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.\”

Well I haven’t had much luck with finding articles on my other topic, technology in education, so I decided to scan through the feeds for standardized testing once again and came across another interesting topic; Parental Smoking Associated with Teens’ Below-Par Test Scores. According to this article, “Teenage exposure at home to second-hand tobacco smoke seems to go hand in hand with poor performance on standardized academic tests, investigators here [Philadelphia] found.” Statistics show:

If either parent smoked, a child had 25% to 30% higher failure rate compared with children of nonsmokers, Bradley Collins, Ph.D., of Temple University, and colleagues, reported in the October issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The higher failure rate held up for either ordinary or advanced-level examinations.

This never occurred to me that second-hand smoke could affect someone’s test taking abilities. I knew that smoking and second-hand smoke can cause lung cancer and other problems, but had no idea it could affect the academic outcome of a student. The article also stated that their study shows that “tobacco smoke is an environmental toxin that affects academic performance.”

The investigators analyzed data from 6,380 women and their offspring in the 1958 National Child Development Study. Pass-fail performance was assessed by means of British standardized achievement tests (ordinary-level and advanced-level). The results showed that prenatal exposure to environmental tobacco smoke did not affect test performance, whether assessed by ordinary-level or advanced-level exams. However, parental smoking significantly increased the likelihood of test failure on either test, as did the family’s socioeconomic status. Maternal smoking increased the likelihood of ordinary-level test failure by 29% and paternal smoking by 30%. Male sex and smoking by the teenager also increased the likelihood of test failure. In the advanced-level tests, maternal smoking increased the risk of test failure by 24% and paternal smoking increased the risk by 27%. The only other significant predictors of failure were female sex and smoking by the teenager. These data highlight the importance of helping parents create smoke-free homes for their children-outcomes that can be achieved without requiring the immediate parental smoking cessation. Indeed, parental smoking cessation is the ideal outcome in reducing the children’s environmental tobacco smoke exposure.

“Evidence herein should further encourage multipronged efforts to reduce adolescents’ environmental tobacco smoke exposure.” So how do we do that? How can we stop people from smoking? It’s nearly impossible for people to avoid smoke. Many restaurants now are 100% no smoking, as well as other commercial buildings. But what about the students who live with smokers? We can’t make a law to prohibit everyone from smoking just to help students do better on tests. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for not smoking, especially if smoking does affect test scores, but I don’t believe there is no logical way to get everyone to quit doing it. The article added, “An environmental tobacco smoke reduction intervention would be a positive alternative to quitting smoking for those parents not willing or ready to consider abstinence-only treatment.”

Full Article Here

Resource: medpagetoday.com
By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
September 24, 2007

One of the topics that I chose to focus on during this semester is standardized testing and why/why it’s not important. I came across an article that focused on NCLB and the idea of standardized testing. I was amazed once I started reading this article, because the idea of it was to get rid of the NCLB law completely. When I read the first line, “The federal No Child Left Behind Act is a failure,” I just had to keep reading to figure out why because so many people make such a big shpeel about this Act and its importance. The main point of this article is to reauthorize this act. According to Congressman George Miller, D-Solano and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, the Act is flawed. Miller and Pelosi are both attempting to reauthorize this Act, but by doing so, they are not fixing the most flawed parts. According to TheReporter.com, “they are making it worse by adding amendments that would further punish our students and discourage future teachers from entering the profession.”

This article shocked me because I always thought that the NCLB Act was made to help students in education and provide equal opportunities for them. But according to this article, it’s just making education for these students worse. “The Miller/Pelosi reauthorization plan continues to measure student and school success based primarily on standardized test scores, and fails to include multiple measures such as: (1) Attendance rates, (2) Graduation rates, (3) A rigorous curriculum, and (4) The number of students participating in honors or advanced placement courses.” This is where this article fits into my topic of standardized tests. The current focus on standardized testing is that teachers are supposed to teach to the test. “According to a recent study by the Center on Education Policy, a majority of the nation’s school districts report that while increasing time for test preparation, they have decreased class time for science, social studies, art, music and physical education.” And what’s really sad is that in elementary school, lunch periods have been cut short so that students are able to have more time to prepare for these standardized tests. I don’t even remember ever taking a standardized test in elementary school.

The idea of NCLB is to provide equal opportunities to schools around the nation. But “rather than providing assistance and resources to help all students and schools succeed, the Miller/Pelosi reauthorization proposal continues to punish lower-performing schools.” Another thing that shocked me was that they are trying to use this new proposal as a way to mandate how they should pay their teachers. “We know that test scores by themselves don’t fairly measure student achievement; they certainly will not be able to accurately evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness.”

“If Congressman Miller and Speaker Pelosi would just focus on these proven reforms, No Child Left Behind could become a positive force in helping our students and schools succeed. But as long as they insist on continuing the failed one-size-fits-all, federally mandated but not fully funded system that has been forced on us, we will have no choice but to stand together and urge our congressional representatives to vote no on all of the Miller/Pelosi reauthorization proposals.” This final statement pretty much sums up my opinion of this reauthorization idea. I believe that so far, the NCLB has helped many schools and students succeed, so why change it?

Resources: thereporter.com Full article here

Since this is my first blog and since we have only had this class two times, I’ll start off by introducing myself so the rest of the class can get to know me a little more. I am a senior here at GV. I transferred in as a Junior in the Fall of 2006. I am an English major and a Sociology minor. I am interested in teaching Secondary Education.

Because I do plan on teaching Secondary Education, I am very interested in learning more and writing about standardized testing and the effect of technology in schools on students. I hope to learn more about why standardized testing is so important in schools and how schools around the country and maybe even around the world are incorporating this kind of testing into their schools. I hope by reading about standardized testing that I am able to explain to my future students the importance of it. By reading and writing about the effects of technology on students, I hope to learn new ways to incorporate technology into my own classroom.

The feeds that I subscribed to are New York Times Education and Google Reader Education. I am still looking at other major newspapers as well. I believe that these feeds are important because it well select specific articles that are important to education and by my reading of these articles, I will learn more about the field in which I want to be a part of.