Like I said before, the textbook companies like to throw everything and the kitchen sink into their books so they can please everyone. There is one more major problem with the Aventa curriculum has that makes me think they have no experience teaching. Sometimes I show the questions to other teachers or friends and family and they have a hard time figuring out what the question is asking, but even if they do their answer almost never matches the “official” answer I am only supposed to give credit for. And to top it off they seem to choose the most awkwardly, or erroneously, worded ones. But for some reason the Aventa quizzes and tests are taken from the formative chapter review questions. One of the first things we learn in education is the difference between formative and summative questions and when to use each. The test questions are used to measure a student’s learning. They are meant to get the student thinking, to engage them. Review questions tend to be open ended, they can have many different answers. These are two different types of questions. The textbooks have chapter review questions and they have chapter test questions. So they aren’t subject matter experts, but there is also a reason to assume that they don’t have any education training. This is the only assessment from the most important chapter of the class. That is the entire quiz, eight mostly multiple choice questions from two ancillary topics. The next four questions are, again, the same question reworded four different ways, and from another secondary topic. Also, the question comes from one of the secondary topics. For example, on a quiz for one of my classes, say the chapter has five main and ten secondary topics, the first four problems ask the same exact question just worded a little differently. But, unfortunately, the Aventa people do. They don’t expect one teacher to create a test and use two versions of the same question. They will rewrite the same question ten, twenty times and include all versions in the bank because different teachers will prefer different versions. The textbook companies create test banks of hundreds and hundreds of questions because they want to be all things to all teachers. Furthermore, the selection of questions that are included on the tests and quizzes is unusual. The introductory paragraphs read like they are written by someone who barely has a grasp of the material. Nor do I think they have training or experience in education. I don’t know who Aventa employs to do this cutting and pasting but judging by the results I do not think they are subject matter specialists. The lesson will contain a few paragraphs introducing the topic, they will have the students read a section of a chapter, they will ask the student to do a few problems from the book, and lastly, there will be some form of graded assessment, taken from textbook review problems. They choose a textbook from one of the major textbook companies, and cut it up into lessons. When Aventa creates a course it is fairly bare bones. My school gets the majority of its high school material from a mail order company called Aventa. Most cyber schools get their curriculum from K12, a company started by William Bennett, a former federal Secretary of Education. In truth our school purchases whatever it can get from third party vendors. The curriculum is touted as first class material, designed by experts. The results are hard to measure, but I fear that they are worse than anyone suspects. So the top priority becomes customer satisfaction instead of student learning. But the problem is that they are only started by for-profit companies who try to run them like businesses. When I first started working at a cyber school I thought they were the future of education, and I still do.
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