It's that time of year! State exams are beginning all over the country, and every teacher everywhere is experiencing some level of anxiety over student performance. Unfortunately, we are not just anxious about student success, but we are also anxious about how their performance on those exams will reflect on us.
For those of you not in the know, or who are fortunate enough to work in a state that does not subscribe to this practice, many states tie student performance on state-mandated exams to the evaluation of their teachers. For me in Florida, how my students perform on their Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) counts for 30% of my yearly evaluation! This can be quite frustrating for teachers who teach ESL or SPED students who struggle with literacy, test-taking, and language.
The day that test scores become available to teachers is a mix of fear and excitement - how did my students perform? I have experienced opening that document and feeling my heart sink into my stomach. When students perform poorly on their exams, it reflects poorly on me.
But I taught them all of the things!
Unfortunately, test scores are looked at as a means of determining how well a teacher taught the standards and concepts prescribed by the state, so when students do poorly, it stands to reason that the teacher did poorly teaching.
The only way to recover from poor test scores is reflection. What didn't work this year? What can I improve on for next year? What can I do to better address my students' needs?
But what do you do if you have done that and are working your teacher tail off and still aren't getting results?
Well, I have been there too. The students who I teach struggle so hard in testing. This is for a myriad of reasons that I could probably write a dissertation on, but I will spare you!
Here's what I learned from trying many different strategies including test-taking skills practice, exposing students to more test-similar questions, changing instructional strategies completely, interactive notebooks.... no interactive notebooks...
It wasn't making a difference.
Then, at some point it dawned on me.
Students don't understand the questions.
And not in the obvious way. Duh, right? Of course they don't understand the questions, they are getting them wrong!
No. What I mean is... they don't understand the question. They don't understand what it is asking them to actually do and what they need to call upon in their brain in order to answer it.
Students might be able to identify a theme in their sleep, but if they don't understand that a question is asking them to use that skill, it doesn't mean anything.
Seems obvious, right? But understand what a question is asking and understanding what a question is asking you for are different!
So here's what I did:
I pulled texts from our reading program Achieve 3000 and focused on the questions themselves. Not answering the question, but dissecting it into it's parts.
1. What is this question asking me to DO?
2. What skill do I need to know in order to answer this question?
3. How to I answer this question (how do I physically answer it - multiple choice, drag-and-drop, short answer, etc.)
I created a 4-column chart that includes check boxes related to the skills that they obtained throughout the school year, and had students practice dissecting the questions.
At first this was a disaster and students had no idea what they were supposed to do.
Their first instinct is to provide an answer to the question and move on! What sorcery is this question dissection?
Once we did a few together and students began to practice, they began to see the correlation between the language used in the question and the skills that we had practiced in class. They realized that they knew more than they though they did.
Rarely on an exam is a question going to directly ask a student to recall a specific skill. Instead they will be asked indirectly to apply a specific skill to a particular text within the context of that text. So what students need to learn is how to correlate the question itself to a skill that they know. By having them deconstruct questions, they are practicing how to understand the question.
Of course, students need to apply that type of deconstruction when they take the actual exam and really analyze each question, but if they are comfortable with doing this or they recognize certain patterns in how questions are asked, it can make taking the text much less painful for them.
Nothing is worse than knowing that you students can identify the central idea of any text, only to find that they got every central idea question on the exam wrong!
(We will sidestep the part about how incredibly sad it is that we even have to spend time teaching students how to effectively take an exam... another dissertation I could write for you...)
If your students are struggling with state exams, try having them deconstruct questions. In the future, I will use this strategy from the beginning of the year so that students have ample time to practice!
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