Before He Cheats - A Teacher Parody

The testing season is definitely upon us and I found a video that I thought you might enjoy. It's a parody of Carrie Underwood's video "Before He Cheats" and it deals with a cheating student from the teacher's perspective. It's filmed on location at the Rock School in Gainesville, Florida.

Culinary Techniques - A New Culinary Arts Product from MAVCC

MAVCC is pleased to announce the release of Culinary Techniques, ©2009. Techniques, the third book in the Culinary Arts series, explores the essentials of food production, including tools and equipment, stocks, soups and gravies, salads, hors d’oeuvres, breakfast cookery, meats, desserts, garde manger, and much more. The curriculum is designed to give students a solid grounding in the fundamental skills needed for work in the commercial kitchen.

The MAVCC Culinary Arts Series aligns with the American Culinary Federation competencies.

Books in the Culinary Arts Series include the following components: a student edition, consisting of a student guide and student workbook, and a teacher CD-ROM. The student guide contains unit objectives, information sheets and student supplements, while the student workbook contains consumable assignment sheets and job sheets. The teacher CD-ROM includes a crosswalk to ACF standards, instructional/task analysis, training and competency profiles, tools, equipment and materials list, basic skills matrix, academic and workplace skills analysis, unit review sheets, customizable tests and electronic presentations.

Other books in this series include:

Beverage Management
This publication gives foodservice workers the knowledge they need to get
started in the industry. Topics include: Beverage Basics, Wine, and Laws and
Responsible Beverage Service. MAVCC 2007

Culinary Concepts
Culinary Concepts whets students’ appetites for working in foodservice. Topics covered in the publication include: Introduction to Hospitality, Workplace Skills, Employability Skills, Business and Math Skills, Safety, Sanitation, Dining Room Service, Nutrition, Menu Planning, Purchasing and Receiving, and Management. Created and planned by industry experts and instructors alike. MAVCC 2006

Advanced Pastry Arts
Under Development! Units in this upcoming publication include: Baking Basics, Advanced Breads and Baking, Chocolate and Candies, Decorative Cakes, Pastries, and Confections, and Advanced Desserts. MAVCC 2009

For more information or to order, visit MAVCC's Web site at http://www.mavcc.com/ or call 1-800-654-3988.

If you are wondering whether this resource will work for you, go to www.mavcc.com and download a copy of the instructional/task analysis, crosswalk to the ACF standards, and sample teacher and student pages for this publication. They’re FREE and you will have a chance to review the content, format, and even try out a unit of instruction with the students.

I highly recommend all of MAVCC's products! J.T.

Questionmark and the CareerTech Testing Center

I wanted to let you know that you can now access the CareerTech Testing Center Blog at Questionmark!

Questionmark’s mission is to provide the highest quality testing and assessment software and support services to enable individuals and organizations reach their goals. Questionmark has powered the CareerTech Testing Center's online testing system for years and we are looking forward to an even brighter future with them.

They have also recently created their own Questionmark Blog which I highly recommend.

Take a look at a recent post by Greg Pope, Analytics and Psychometrics Manager for Questionmark:

Psychometrics 101: Item Total Correlation

The item total correlation is a correlation between the question score (e.g., 0 or 1 for multiple choice) and the overall assessment score (e.g., 67%). It is expected that if a participant gets a question correct they should, in general, have higher overall assessment scores than participants who get a question wrong. Similarly with essay type question scoring where a question could be scored between 0 and 5 participants who did a really good job on the essay (got a 4 or 5) should have higher overall assessment scores (maybe 85-90%). This relationship is shown in an example graph below.


This relationship in psychometrics is called ‘discrimination’ referring to how well a question differentiates between participants who know the material and those that do not know the material. Participants who know the material taught to them should get high scores on questions and high overall assessment scores. Participants who did not master the material should get low scores on questions and lower overall assessment scores. This is the relationship that an item-total correlation provides to help evaluate the performance of questions. We want to have lots of highly discriminating questions on our tests because they are the most fine-tuned measurements to find out what participants know and can do.

When looking at an item-total correlation generally negative values are a major red flag it is unexpected that participants who get low scores on the questions get high scores on the assessment. This could indicate a mis-keyed question or that the question was highly ambiguous and confusing to participants. Values for an item-total correlation (point-biserial) between 0 and 0.19 may indicate that the question is not discriminating well, values between 0.2 and 0.39 indicate good discrimination, and values 0.4 and above indicate very good discrimination.

Thanks again to Greg and QuestionMark for sharing all of the great information! J.T.

What Everybody Ought to Know About Life.com

LIFE.com, is now offering the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web (currently over 7,000,000 and 3,000+ added every day).

LIFE and Getty Images, have joined forces to provide you instant access to millions of photographs — for FREE. Taken by the world’s top photographers and curated by LIFE editors, they tell the story of our times — our heroes, our stars, our celebrations and heartbreak, the events etched in our memory and the small moments that make life sweet. When you find a photo you like, you'll be able to share it, print it, and sometimes even buy it. You can also sign up their weekly "Picks of the Week" E-newsletter.

Life was once America's leading photo-centric news magazine, Life chronicled the nation and the world for seven decades before issuing its last print publication in 2007. Life's last editor, Bill Shapiro, who heads up the new project, wants students, teachers, and parents to use the site to make history more tangible. "The most iconic moments in American history -- we have those," Shapiro reports. "We didn't want simply to create a historical repository or a dusty archive. We wanted these events to feel as alive as they did when they happened."

Photos on the site are organized into five channels: news, celebrity, travel, animals, and sports. Visitors can print individual images and share them through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. New features of Life.com, due to roll out in the coming months, will allow users to create their own photo galleries (on, say, the life and work of Maya Angelou, for English class, or animal life in the Everglades, for science). All the site's tools will be FREE.

The new site also allows visitors to flip through a series of Life covers on World War II or compare portraits of Miss America 1945 and Miss America 2009. A search for "civil rights" turns up 7,104 photos and 10 curated galleries on such themes as the vote, the Freedom Riders, and Coretta Scott King. A search for F. Scott Fitzgerald returns 21 photos. Albert Einstein: 187. Jackie Robinson: 248. Many of the photos and captions, taken together, tell a full story.

I had forgotten how much I missed Life magazine. I hope you enjoy this new site! J.T.

Why Do We Test Students?

After a few recent conversations I thought it was time to address why we test and there are typically many reasons for why we test (educational, psychological, legislative, etc.). At the present time, most educational discussions seem to focus solely on accountability and there are justifiable reasons for that. As long as money is involved, there will always be that argument, but that isn't the purpose of this discussion.

I would really like to get past all of the legislative reasons for conducting testing and return to what I consider is the "core" reason for testing. First of all, it involves an "individual" and a test is simply a point in time reference of a student's ability on a set of predetermined standards/objectives. I think there are two primary views that most people consider when testing and I would hope that we consider both of these views and others when evaluating results:

One view …is to determine whether or not the students have mastered the objectives.
Another View …is to help the student by diagnosing academic weaknesses.

I would also like to add that you should look at trends in test results across all students that will assist an educator in identifying his/her own instructional weaknesses. For example, does your curriculum match up with the specified standards and the high level of thinking in those standards? You can also analyze trends in your results to identify program weaknesses and this could be at the local, district, or state level.

Again, I think the primary goal is on the individual. In other words, how do we help an individual student become as prepared for their future as they can be? I often hear the argument that we should build success into our courses so that students can be successful and that we shouldn't build anything into tests that show what they do not know. Then why test at all? Everyone should have the feeling of success, but a student should know that a test will not only point out what they don't know, but what they DO KNOW. Assessment, in an educational setting, is a form of feedback and it should discriminate, not against individuals, but across variables.

A test should be used as positive feedback. The negative portion of any test, what the student did not know, is simply a means for remediation (for any area of relative weakness). Remediation should involve not only the student, but the instructor and the program. After all, even your best students should have relative weaknesses that need to be addressed. For example, if a student scored 94/100 on an exam, but every question missed was in a specific area, then we shouldn't just hand the results back and say, "Great job!" We should say, "Great Job!' and use positive reinforcment on all the things they do know, but their area of relative weakness should also be addressed.

To briefly summarize, a student will find success on any educational test when their ability and effort are effectively combined with instruction and resources. This is really a fluid equation as one portion of this concept may be weighted more heavily than another and this may effectively offset a weakness in any portion of the equation. The key is to analyze the results from a number of different perspectives and to always ask, "WHY?"

My main point is that many factors contibute to a test score and we should always do our best to analyze the results for each individual student. These factors are both internal and external and please remember that you are assessing "individuals." There are many other things that can affect results that we really haven't touched on such as home environment, socio-economic status, cognitive ability, testing environment, specific learning disabilities, etc.

Our goal is to try and understand "ALL" of the factors that comprise an individual score.