. . . But Arkansas Reading Tests Are Bad
Posted by SBuck | Arkansas, Education | February 09, 2010
In the previous post, I said that I would address whether Arkansas reading tests do a good job of covering material that is actually taught in the rest of the curriculum.
So I looked at the grades 3-8 Benchmark tests available here. I wasn’t impressed with what I found.
In a recent year, Arkansas students collectively faced the following reading passages:
- A passage on Olympic bobsledding
- A recipe for cookies
- A fictional story about children writing mean notes
- A story about kings, dragons, and princesses
- The history of a set of duckling statues in Boston
- Instructions on how to make a toy car
- A fictional story called “My Mom Hates to Cook”
- A passage titled “The Invention of the Trampoline”
- A passage about snowboarding
- A fictional story called “Priscilla and the Wimps”
- A biography of a female French painter from the 1800s
- A passage about buying a skateboard
- A story (possibly fictional, possibly not) about growing up in an old farmhouse
- The history of Jumbo the elephant in P.T. Barnum’s circus
- An inspirational story called “You Can Do Anything,” in which Boy Scouts plant trees
- A biographical passage about Alexander the Great
- A story about a female working at NASA
- A historical passage about George Washington
To be sure, these reading passages — considered collectively — do cover a few topics that touch on historical, scientific, or cultural knowledge (such as fertilizing trees or NASA or the history of colonial America). Even the story about kings and dragons implicitly requires that students be familiar with the concepts of “king,” “princess,” etc.
But it seems obvious that these reading tests could do a much better job of covering the actual knowledge that we expect children to learn in particular grades. Why do Arkansas tests have so much inane and poorly written fiction — not to mention passages about bobsledding, snowboarding, and skateboarding (none of which are important parts of the curriculum, I hope)?
One theory, of course, is that by testing how kids can read inane passages about random facts, the Arkansas tests won’t unfairly privilege the cultural knowledge of a few rich kids. But that’s not true: rich kids from Bentonville who vacation in Colorado are probably much more likely to know about snowboarding and bobsledding (for example) than is a rice farmer’s kid in the Delta.
To replace all of this fluff, the reading tests should include more passages about works of art or music, American government and history, and the sciences. And those passages should be directly tied to the official curricular Frameworks. This would be fair(er) to the poor Delta kid who might at least have had a chance to learn about the material in various other classes. On top of that, reading tests would effectively be testing the entire curriculum, not just a detached skill called “reading.”
P.S. I’m not considering here whether the Frameworks themselves are well written. On a quick glance, some of them are specific enough to be useful to a classroom teacher, but there are plenty of standards like the following, which could mean anything and which would be very difficult to test: “Analyze the impact of ideas, information, and technology on global interdependence” (that’s for 4th graders).
I can only speak for the 11th grade test, but they divide the passages up into 3 types for it:
Literary: (short stories or poem, usually).
Content Area: (material from some other content area, most often social studies)
Practical: some text that would be encountered in the “real world.” These could be recipes, instructions, pamphlets, or anything of that nature.
Students get 2 of each of these, for a total of 6 passages on which they’re graded.
Nice fish!
I’m not certain how beneficial it would be to tie the reading section of a standardized test to standards. I absolutely agree with the point that it at least levels the playing field in that it is more likely to put students on a common ground. However, I always thought that the purpose of assessing a student’s reading comprehension was to determine the extent to to which students can read and then process a passage (regardless of familiarity but obviously still on grade level). If reading passages are tied to curricula, students may be answering questions correctly due to prior content knowledge, meaning that students may obtain high marks based on content knowledge as opposed to actual reading ability. Removing bias, in terms of passage topics, may be difficult but not entirely impossible.
But I guess Hirsch would argue that it’s impossible — unless you use nonsense text like Jabberwocky — to come up with a pure “reading” test that doesn’t also effectively measure background knowledge, whether you want it to or not. So because your ability to “read” an essay is always going to be determined largely by your knowledge about the essay’s subject, reading tests might as well be based on subjects that students have studied.
I think what I’m trying to get at is that the skill of reading is really diverse. In evaluating a student’s ability to read critically, really dissect a passage, it would probably be best to incorporate course content areas. However, reading is also a skill that individuals use to acquire new knowledge. For example, If I want to learn about nuclear physics, outside of a classroom setting, then I’m probably going to read-up on the subject. Therefore, in assessing reading skills, students should also be tested in their abilities to process contents/subjects with which they are not so familiar. It would be impossible to find a text that is completely unfamiliar to every student (except maybe a Jabberwocky passage), but there are probably subjects/contents that are unfamiliar to the vast majority of the population (e.g. cricket, 18th century Polish ballet, Marxist humor, etc.).
Ahh, but my kids have been immersed in summer classes in Marxist humor since before they could walk. Here’s a good one:
A group of workers enter the boss’s office and tell him that they have just taken over the factory. “You can’t”, says the boss. “I own it”
“And how did you come to own it?” asks one of the workers.
“It was left to me by my father”, says the boss.
“How did he get it?” asks the worker.
“He got it from his father”, says the boss.
“And he?” asks the worker.
“From his father”, says the boss.
“And he?” persists the worker.
“He fought for it”, says the capitalist in a burst of familial pride.
“Well”, say the workers, all together this time, “We’ll fight you for it”.