— The American Association for Jewish Education (AAJE) and the Institute for Computers in Jewish Life (ICJL) announced this week an agreement to have the ICJL furnish comprehensive computer services for the national testing program for Jewish schools administered by the AAJE’s Shteinshleifer Testing Bureau.
In a joint statement issued from ICJL headquarters here, Institute president Dr. Irving Rosenbaum and AAJE director Dr. Shimon Frost said the agreement entails “the utilization of sophisticated computer technique that will help Jewish educators measure the efficacy of their school curricula.”
Rosenbaum and Frost said that schools whose classes take the AAJE’s standardized tests in various subject areas “will be given analytical printouts showing not only how their students fared against one another but how their scores compared with those of other schools and communities.
“This will provide them with vital information, not previously available, which can guide them in examining aspects of their curricula in which their students tested poorly and in considering changes in that curricula to correct possible lapses of deficiencies in their materials, programs and/or methodologies.”
SCORES TO BE FED INTO COMPUTER BANK
In addition, Rosenbaum and Frost said test scores will be fed into a computer bank “to facilitate an ongoing item analysis of each test question, thereby alerting AAJE education specialists as to the possible need to make revisions in the test instruments themselves.”
By example, they said that if a disproportionate number of students answered a given question correctly or incorrectly–indicating that it might be either too hard or too easy–that question would likely be replaced “so that the full test continues to maintain an established norm of what the student should be expected to know in the particular area of study.”
The AAJE’s Shteinshleifer Testing Bureau–which bears the name of New York Jewish communal leader Boris Shteinshleifer, whose gift enabled the agency to resume its national testing program last year–is presently concluding its work on the first standardized Hebrew language tests for grades 3 and 6 in Jewish day schools.
Once these tests have been “pilot-tested” themselves in controlled day school settings, they will be published for national dissemination this fall, together with two other Hebrew languages tests for grades 2 and 3 in afternoon supplementary schools that were developed by the Chicago Board of Jewish Education.
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