{"id":5958,"date":"2006-01-11T02:34:30","date_gmt":"2006-01-11T07:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/?p=5958"},"modified":"2006-01-11T07:00:59","modified_gmt":"2006-01-11T12:00:59","slug":"cultural-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/?p=5958","title":{"rendered":"CULTURAL BIAS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think that many times testing critics&#8217; complaints of cultural bias in tests are just a bunch of hand-waving nonsense.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scoop.co.nz\/stories\/HL0601\/S00074.htm\"><em>Scoop<\/em><\/a> seems to have found a couple of examples of the genuine article in the practice test for  NY&#8217;s high stakes 8th-grade test:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.&#8221; And here&#8217;s one of the four questions:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A two matches in one day<br \/>\n&#8220;B against each other<br \/>\n&#8220;C with two balls at once<br \/>\n&#8220;D as partners&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>OK, class, do you know the answer? (By the way, I didn&#8217;t cheat: there&#8217;s nothing else about &#8220;doubles&#8221; in the text.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>OK, it&#8217;s just the practice test, and maybe the obvious bias is why this item didn&#8217;t make the cut.  But, if I were a parent with a kid in the NY g-schools, that practice item sure wouldn&#8217;t give me a case of the warm fuzzies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think that many times testing critics&#8217; complaints of cultural bias in tests are just a bunch of hand-waving nonsense. Scoop seems to have found a couple of examples of the genuine article in the practice test for NY&#8217;s high stakes 8th-grade test: &#8220;The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}