This week my students and I have been working through practice materials the State provides us for the big tests next week.

I’m thinking about the reasons for jumping through the test prep hoop. Nobody requires it. This is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations. In doing and reviewing the practice test the kids might sour on taking the actual test and might not learn anything, anyway. But, then again, maybe they could benefit from it. I don’t think there’s any research data on whether it helps.

Speaking of data, Diane Ravitch asked the money questions on the efficacy of the whole high-stakes enterprise:

Will a school get better if the staff is replaced? Maybe, maybe not. Will it get better if it is turned into a charter school? Maybe, maybe not. Will it get better if it is handed over to a private management company? Maybe, maybe not. Will it get better if the state takes it over? Here we can say with certainty that no state has any track record of taking over low-performing schools and turning them into high-performing schools.

So, I question why the federal government has written a law imposing sanctions that have no basis in experience.

The counselor brings us a stack of workbooks with the sample questions and an answer key, and I run the drill because there’s a chance it might make a difference. I call it a dress rehearsal. We simulate the actual test so that - What? - we can (maybe) plug any “gaps” in their content knowledge? Not likely. But it might help them understand the format and language of the test.

The book, A Teacher’s Guide To Standardized Reading Tests (Calkins, Montgomery, Santman) describes the work of a research group from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project that did observational studies of students in simulated testing situations. The authors document test preparation activities using sample test materials from various sources, watching and listening to students’ reactions, “looking closely at the reasoning behind the mistake…examining the intelligence behind the error” in order to make test preparation more effective (p. 108). They asked:

  • Why did/didn’t you chose this answer?
  • What was your thinking as you worked through this question?
  • I noticed you doing….Why?
  • What are you doing/thinking/where are you looking right now?
  • Do you know what that word means?

I’ve observed, and Calkins confirms, that

In the end, reading the questions, a much less familiar task, often proved to be the greatest reading challenge for them (p. 114).

Their findings help me see where to focus with the practice exercises. We look at the questions, and (try to) pay less attention to the answers. I want to help them see the test as a text that needs to be read in a particular way. It’s hard, though, for little kids to understand how devious test item writers can be. Calkins offers some strategies for test taking, based on the research they did.

Recommended strategies for test taking:

  1. Use the text, not your life, to pick your answer: Avoid relying on your opinions, memories, or personal experience;
  2. Sometimes it’s important to refer to your life: When context is thin, as in a vocabulary exercise, sometimes we need to inventory our prior knowledge;
  3. Choose to answer the question: Learn to paraphrase the question, and consider all of the answer choices;
  4. Risk an unfamiliar choice: Use the process of elimination when all of the known choices seem wrong;
  5. Check your answers: Be selective when reviewing your answers, and develop a system for keeping track of the difficult questions. You don’t have to retake the whole test.

One of the questions from the fourth-grade practice test asks, According to the passage, what are two ways Elephant and Giraffe are similar? In what two ways are they different? Use details from the passage to support your response.

I never had to write a compare/constrast essay at any point in elementary school. I told my fourth-graders as much, and one of them responded, “That’s what my dad says.”

We moved on, but I wondered, what if parents didn’t want their kids tested like this? Susan Ohanian published a Test Takers Bill of Rights that people might want to think about. To ask fourth-graders to write such a complicated essay is a stretch, and mine have been responding to journal prompts and organizing their ideas for writing all year.

That question is emblematic of how the whole standards juggernaut is pushing kids faster than many of them need to go. In The New Anti-Intellectualism in America: When Curricular Rigor and ‘Pedagogical Fraud’ Go Hand in Hand, Nel Noddings questions whether increasing rigor translates into intellectual habits of mind, or simply reduces intellectual activity to a form of mental labor. That’s how it feels, more and more.

If my students had a personal need to produce a structured account of the similarities and differences between any two things, I’d be happy to help them. But 9 year-olds don’t typically think in those terms. This question is a phony academic exercise masquerading as higher level thinking.

They mostly get the job done once they’re oriented to what the question is really asking them to do. (See recommendation #3, above.) There’s a hidden snag buried in this compare/contrast exercise. The story is a fable, and the question asks them to compare the animal characters based on the passage, not on their physical attributes. Ears and trunks and long necks are not relevant. We’ve worked on referring back to the text for evidence a lot, but they fall for this hard unless I warn them. Test item writers are devious. Kids are naive.

It’s a test of reading, for sure. And I’m teaching them to read - the test.