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As a professor of both sociology and Jewish studies, Shelly Tenenbaum conducts research on such wide ranging topics as Jewish self-help societies and attitudes toward a controversial student assessment exam. She also mentors students completing senior honors theses and Holocaust and genocide studies internships. |
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Educators' attitudes towards MCAS
Interview with Emily Stein, Sally Stark-Dreifus, and Anna Lawless
Sociology majors Emily Stein '05, Sally Stark-Dreifus '05, and Anna Lawless '05 have recently completed an
investigation of attitudes towards the controversial test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). Since 2003, a passing grade on MCAS has been required for high school graduation in Massachusetts. Some educators believe that,
by insuring that all high school graduates meet a minimum standard of competence in reading, writing,
and mathematics, MCAS will help to close the race and class achievement gap. Others, however, think
that MCAS should not be required for graduation. They worry that its implementation will discourage
creativity in teaching and curricula, and lead to an increased drop out rate by discouraging low-income,
minority, and ESL students, as well as students with learning disabilities.
Sociology professor Shelly
Tenenbaum wanted to learn more about who does and does not support use of MCAS, and she recruited Emily, Sally, and Anna to work with her on the project. In a recent interview,
summarized below, the students discussed their research.
Was this research associated with a course that you were all taking?
Anna: No, it was designed as an independent study project for which we received credit.
Sally, I understand that you began working with Professor Tenenbaum during fall semester 2004 while Emily
and Anna were doing internships in London. Could you describe this early phase of the project?
During the fall semester Professor Tenenbaum, another student, Libby Henry '05, and I did a lot of
brainstorming about what we wanted to find out. Based on the sociology literature that we'd read, we
thought we would find a big difference in opinion about MCAS between urban and suburban educators.
We also discussed what kinds of methods--interviews, questionnaires, etc.--that we'd use. We decided to
use questionnaires to survey the attitudes of principals and superintendents in Worcester, Boston, and
a selection of suburban towns around those two cities. A questionnaire would be easy for them to fill
out, wouldn't take a lot of their time, and would be relatively easy for us to analyze. On the
Massachusetts Department of Education web site we found the names of the principals and superintendents
we wanted to contact.
Designing the questionnaire took a lot of work, and we had help from psychology professor Michael Addis,
who's done a lot of work with written questionnaires. We did a literature review to help us determine the
questions we wanted to ask. We started by reviewing relevant articles in the Boston Globe and the
Worcester Telegram & Gazette to find what people had been writing and saying about MCAS. We read
Theresa Perry and William Julius Wilson to get more background on educators' attitudes and how differences in class
and background might affect their opinions. These readings helped us figure out how to create questions
that get at what we were trying to find out. After a lot of revisions, we completed the questionnaires.
When Anna and Emily returned to Clark for the spring 2005 semester, the three of us wrote cover letters,
sent out the questionnaires, and then waited for the responses.
Emily: We also started investigating the demographic methods we wanted to use and discussed how to
structure the final report.
How many questionnaires did you send out and get back?
Sally: We had a great response rate. We sent out 306 questionnaires and got back 107.
Then you started the data entry and analysis.
Sally: Yes. Diane Mercon Griffin, the office assistant for the sociology department, and Jeff Himmelberger,
Clark's Institutional Research Coordinator, helped us so much with that. Diane helped us code the
responses, and Jeff helped us enter all the information into a computer program called the Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences. That allowed us to do frequency, correlational, crosstabulation, and
regressional analyses. It was an interesting learning process. We also created graphs of our different
data variables.
Anna: It was really interesting. I actually learned how these types of analyses work!
What are some of the conclusions that you reached?
Sally: We wanted to learn if there was a connection between attitudes toward MCAS and the demographic
profile--gender, occupation (principal or superintendent), geography (urban or suburban) and race--of the
respondents. While the majority of our sample (61%) supported the use of MCAS, a similar percentage
disagreed with its being a requirement for graduation. Our analyses indicated that gender was the most
significant predictor of attitude, then occupation, and then geography. Men were more pro-MCAS than women,
as were superintendents and urban educators. We had hypothesized that there would be strong attitudinal
differences base on race, but there weren't.
Please comment on how doing something like this was different from learning in a more traditional
classroom setting.
Anna: One thing Professor Tenenbaum said a lot was that she really wanted us to get to know the ups and
downs of original research. And we definitely did. There were times when the project was really
frustrating and we didn't feel like we were getting anywhere. And then there were times when it was
thrilling. Like the stuff we were finding out. The way it was all coming together. In the classroom
I think it's much more formulaic. You know what you're going to be learning.
Emily: I think it was just a really good learning experience. The three of us had to work really closely
and we got along very well, and with Shelly, and felt very supported. Clark is small, you get to know your
teachers, but with Shelly, well, I called her at home several times. One time I could hear her telling her
children: 'give me a half hour, I need to talk to Emily!' I don't know if that's a typical scenario, but
we definitely challenged ourselves on a lot of different levels, academically, emotionally. It was a great
learning experience.
Sally: Absolutely. We were so close with Shelly that it was okay to butt heads and debate ideas back and
forth.
Anna: It's much more egalitarian.
Sally: Right. it was very constructive that way, because the four of us were a team. I think it was an
incredible relationship, the kind you strive to have in college, but that a lot of people don't. And at
Clark that's one of the things I think is so amazing, that you can have that kind of relationship with
your professors.
Emily: I spent hours with Sally doing the graphs and having Sally explain to me how to do things. A lot of
times in the classroom it's just the teacher teaching, but we were closely working with the teacher as a
team, and learning a lot from each other as well. Plus going to other resources. We were accessing other
teachers, seeking them out for assistance in their specialties. So we were really collaborating on so many
different levels.
Sally: When doing something like this you're really aware of the resources that are available at Clark.
The idea of the Clark community--well, it really showed through, because we got so much help from so many
different people. For example, we got help from work-study students in the sociology department. They
helped us send out letters, print them out, all kinds of stuff. It was just an amazing experience.
Emily: I think we all feel that it's a really good project. We're all passionate about it because we did it.
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Additional Resources
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Clockwise from top left: Shelly Tenenbaum, Emily Stein, Anna Lawless, Sally Stark-Dreifus
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Resources at Clark