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.
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
Our friend Michael McShane had a recent
As a parent, I’ve never been a huge Santa fan. I do a lot of research and make a lot of exhausting trips to the stores during Christmas to track down the items that will make my children happy come Christmas morning, and it’s always annoyed me that the guy in the red suit gets all the credit.
But to cite safety?! If you’ve ever doubted how stupid some retailers think we are, you should make a mental note to never doubt again. That is, unless you think a bit of Allspark might be loose in your local mall and could turn your camera into a killing machine.
After losses to Morgan State, East Tennessee State, and South Alabama, and having to go into overtime to squeak by Appalachian State (all home games!), it’s likely that John Pelphrey will have to pull off a miracle to save his job this year. I’m not saying I’ve given up on Razorback basketball, but all signs suggest this could be one of the worst seasons in history.
The symptoms of Pelphrey’s problem have become obvious: He can’t recruit and retain quality players. The cause of those symptoms is less clear. How does one explain that out of six of last year’s highly touted recruits, only Rotnei Clarke currently plays for the Razorbacks? Gone are Montrell McDonald, Andre Clark, Brandon Moore, Jason Henry, and, for the moment, Courtney Fortson.
if we end up in a coaching search come spring (and I think we will), we can only hope that Mike Anderson will still give us the time of day. Hopefully it means something to him that Frank Broyles is no longer in charge, and that the vast majority of Arkansans never wanted him or Nolan to leave. 
We’ve had some lively debates here at mid-riffs and in the community at-large about the quality of school buildings. While those debates have often been heated and full of disagreements, we ought to be thankful we live in a place that respects and encourages a diverse set of viewpoints.