The Importance Of Testing To Determine A Student's Success In School

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Reading is essential to a student’s success in school. Comprehension and speed in reading are important in standardised tests; ACT, SAT, etc. Since some colleges don’t accept certain scores, these tests all affect a student’s future. That’s why schools everywhere are trying to map out their students’ progression. They want to be certain that their teaching techniques are effective in all areas, especially reading. So, schools conduct tests to determine individuals’ progress by the end of the year. The question to be explored in these situations is: how much do students progress from the beginning of the year to the end in a particular grade?
In psychology, the scientific study of the mind, you can’t simply jump into research without one essential method used by scientists everywhere. The scientific method guides all research explorations. It relies on gathering results, information, and testing a hypothesis based off of an observation. For starters, a researcher makes an observation and identifies a problem for questioning. My question: how much do students progress from the beginning of the year to the end in the second grade class? The next step involves the development of a theory or hypothesis. A hypothesis is a statement, or educated guess, that predicts a conclusion drawn from the data collected. This statement has to be measurable but can also be general. My hypothesis: in comparison to students’ scores from the beginning of the year to the end, there will be improvement for all students. After this, the next step is to collect information. In order to do this, a proper procedure is required. First, I will narrow a group of students, a particular grade, this is the 2nd grade class, with a variety of ethnicities, academic history, and equal male to female ratio. This is important to have a diverse group of participants. Then, I will create a test based off of state expectations. Half of the test will include material which is prior knowledge to the student, material already covered in previous years. The other half will include material which will be taught throughout the course of the year yet to come. The reason for creating the test in a way that includes untaught information along with previously taught information; to measure the students retention of the new material while recording where the student’s reading level is at, after the summer holidays. The half of the test which contains information which is yet to be taught would not go towards a student’s reading score at the beginning of the school year, it would simply be there to make note of knowledge a student may have retained elsewhere. While in the process of collecting data, a researcher should also take assumptions into account. Prior to the experiment I assumed that a student’s score would improve at the end of the school year. It makes sense that after a year of reading and comprehending text, a student would perform better on a test that is measuring those things specifically. But, what
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Before I move forward with my research, I’ll make sure that I’m following the APA (American Psychological Association) code of ethics. This code of ethics states that participants’ rights and well being need to be guarded, participants need to give written permission after they have been informed on the research, and if a researcher uses trickery or deceit then it needs to be reasonable and justified. The APA code of ethics also states that participants need to be aware that they can discontinue at any time, all of the participants’ information needs to be kept confidential, participants are to be protected from psychological harm, and it is necessary to give all involved in the research a summary of the findings. In order to follow this code of ethics, I would create files for each student and be certain to keep them confidential. I will also send a letter to each of the student’s parents informing them of the experiment and asking for their written permission for their child to be involved in the research. After the research has been conducted, I will then send a summary of the research conclusions and their child’s score to their home address. All of these steps will keep individuals’ information secret, while keeping parents and students aware, which are the two biggest issues for my research

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