Reading Tests Are Potentially Useful
Posted by SBuck | Arkansas, Education, Uncategorized | February 08, 2010

Lots of people criticize standardized tests for focusing too much on math and reading, claiming that tests end up forcing schools to narrow the curriculum to those two subjects.
Curriculum narrowing may occur from time to time, but it is far from necessary. Indeed, it’s counterproductive for a school just to focus on a separate subject called “reading” at the expense of other background knowledge in many other subjects. After all, most reading tests require a student to read various essays, and essays have to be about something.
Banal, I know, but this is the key point: students who have a lot of background knowledge about the essay’s subject, whatever that might be, will do better at “reading.” Past the point of decoding letters, reading is inseparably tied to background knowledge.
As cognitive scientist Dan Willingham says:
Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.” The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it.
Thus, as E.D. Hirsch wrote, state reading tests should be explicitly tied to material that students have been learning in their particular grade. The problem is that the tests usually are “random,” and “not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards.” Instead, “children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.”
Hirsch notes that if “reading passages on each test were culled from each grade’s specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call ‘consequential validity’ — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education.”
For example, if kids in 4th grade have been learning about how the telegraph and the pony express affected westward expansion in the United States (that’s content standard H.6.4.16 in Arkansas), then a good reading test might have an essay on that very topic, or any of the many other topics studied in the 4th grade curriculum.
If that were the case, not only would reading tests be more fair — as they would cover material that everyone had been taught in school — they would actually reinforce all of the other subjects, rather than narrowing the curriculum. The best way to prepare for a good reading test would be simply to teach all the things that kids need to learn about history and science and the arts.
The question I’ll address in the next post is whether Arkansas Benchmark reading tests come anywhere near this ideal.
On the national front, the
Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Our friend 
There were some positive developments at the State Board meeting in Little Rock yesterday concerning the proposed Little Rock Urban Collegiate Public Charter School for Young Men. Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell deserves a lot of credit for standing up for common sense. He argued against the restrictions the LRSD has been asking for and, as reported by the Dem-Gaz, “said the department’s current process for reviewing applications and existing charter schools is inadequate, and he announced plans to establish a charter school review council that will be made up of Education Department staff members, including himself and assistant commissioners.” Naturally, Chris Heller is upset. Here are some excerpts from the article:
Arkansas’ application for Race to the Top funds can now be found
Tomorrow (January 19th) is the deadline for phase-1 Race to the Top applications. As our readers know, the so-called Race to the Top program is a federal program that aims to disperse around $4 billion in education funding to states. We describe the program
Education Week recently released their annual Quality Counts Report. You can see their nifty graphics 