Testing, Testing ... 1, 2, 4

           The other night, I dreamt that I was sitting in my high school gym, hunched over a desk with a number two pencil. I was trying desperately to finish some very important test, but all the numbers kept moving around on the page and the words looked like gibberish. 

            Yep, it’s that testing time of year.

            Today, my third graders began taking a series of standardized tests. When I look at the results in the fall, I know some of the scores will be surprise me.  Undoubtedly, there will be a few students who I thought had mastered the math curriculum or were reading way above grade level. And yet, their scores didn’t show that at all.

            I’ll have to remind myself what I saw today when I looked through the tests and watched the children fill in the circles.

            First, the reading passages can be very simplistic and the questions, tricky.   For instance, in one of our prep packets, there was a poem about a girl who likes to sit and read in her favorite chair. As she reads about faraway lands, she sees “moving pictures” in her head. The children are asked to define those “moving pictures.” Are they thoughts? Movies? Dreams? The correct answer is thoughts.  But do we really see thoughts? What’s wrong with calling them mental “movies?” Besides, wouldn’t the best answer be “images?”

            A second passage tells of a little boy who doesn’t listen to his mother and is captured by a giant. He manages to escape by tricking the giant’s wife.  One question asks how he feels at the end, and the correct answer is happy because the story says he “lived happily ever after.” But couldn’t he also feel a little scared? After all, he did just escape from the giant. Or even worried since he did disobey his mother.

            And that’s just the reading.

            Then there are the suffixes and prefixes that must be identified.  Okay, most third graders don’t need reading glasses, but even so they have to look very carefully to decide which letters are underlined.   There are the references to holidays they’ve never heard of. Or my favorite research question: Where would you go to find information on whales? The internet, obviously. The correct answer is an encyclopedia. 

            You’d think the math would be more straightforward.  But in one math the kids are shown a portion of a grocery receipt with the total cut off.  They’re asked which operation they would use to find out the change from a $20.  Well, there’s no total on the receipt, so they’d have to add. But the correct answer is subtraction, because that’s how you’re supposed to make change from a $20.  Unless, of course, you add the coins up.

            Then there’s the fact that testing doesn’t always bring out the best in everyone.  Some children race through the packets, making careless mistakes.  Others get stuck on a difficult problem and don’t manage to finish.  And some just find themselves looking out the window on a rainy day, wishing they were somewhere else.

            So what do they really mean?