Standardized Testing

For this subject, I am deferring to Oliver DeMille.  He does such a good job explaining it with this article: click here.

Sam just received his scores back from the Explore test a couple of weeks ago.  I noticed he did awesome in Math and....wait for it..... Reading Comprehension.  Wow.  The Math score was totally expected, but the Reading Comprehension score blew me away because the English score was really low compared to the other scores.  We have been working on grammar and stuff, but I really do ascribe to the theory that a student who does a lot of reading (of good quality literature) will learn how things should be written... how they should sound...how ideas are transferred.    The most interesting thing was that in the sections he scored lowest in, the ones that were wrong were all at the end of the section.  I sat down with him and we went through these questions to have a "learning moment".   It turns out that he knew most of those answers.  He just didn't have time during the test, so he guessed.

I try not to place a lot of importance on these tests because, as Oliver describes in the above article, I want them to know how to think and love learning more than I want them to be able to answer multiple choice questions.  When has a person's boss ever asked them to answer multiple choice questions as a regular duty?  When has a business owner every excelled because they could answer multiple choice questions?  What really happens?  We get paid to think.  And - those who out-pace others in the hunger to learn can usually think better.