Straw Bale Construction
January 28th, 2009
I don’t know for sure who develops the Regents exams. I think it’s a team of teachers. And I am sure it’s not easy. But straw bale construction? That’s what the reading section of yesterday’s Comprehensive English Regents exam was about–straw bale construction. Eleventh grade students are interested in a variety of topics, but I doubt this is one of them. Maybe that’s the point. No tangents here for students to wander off on in the response. . . except if they start thinking about those “three little pigs”. Geez.
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5 Responses to “Straw Bale Construction”
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January 29th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Some thoughts:
1. The test isn’t meant to entertain, it’s meant to assess English skills – in this case, reading comprehension.
2. The topic is one that would not allow subpopulations of students to bring in outside/prior knowledge and give an dis/advantage to another. Consider, for example, a passage on a popular form of music – rap or country. Either might be foreign to the majority while quite familiar to a minority.
And on and on and on.
When a student who is a poor reader is given a text on a subject with which they’re familiar, they simply do a better job reading it. Their content knowledge helps out [a la Prof. Dan Willingham's recent articles]. By giving students a fairly content-neutral topic – like straw bale construction – it’s a little easier to see how well they can or can’t read.
[Reply]
Benjamin Reply:
February 17th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I found that the straw bale houses article was harder to comprehend for people that had no idea how a regular house is put together. It was hard for most students to compare between the two which was the whole pirpose of the essay. How is one to list the positive advantages of straw bale houses when they have no idea on the structure of common houses.
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February 1st, 2009 at 12:41 pm
This week I pointed out problems with some of the math regents.
I do not believe that the current method of constructing exams is constructing acceptable exams.
You might look at Weak gravity or Misunderstanding Bias
Jonathan
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February 2nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Had several teachers make similar comments to me about the passage- and then it was pointed out by science teachers and technology teachers that in a world that is looking to become “green” the topic is actually very timely. In that respect, Matthew’s comments are right on. Teachers do create the test and do try to pick things that will be interesting to students but the test is for comprehension. Haven’t we all had something painful to read in the course of our work?
But I also agree with Jonathan that in many instances there is simply not enough training for teachers in constructing exams – Regents or otherwise. While I have to hope that the process SED uses to create the assessments deals with all of the testing issues there are – mistakes do happen!
A more important point for me – what are teachers going to do with the data from those January assessments to help students improve before June?
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February 3rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I was amazed to find out that many of my students liked the passage about the hay bale houses. They thought it was interesting and related to their interests on “going green”. I was relieved after looking at the data that my students did much better on the multiple choice questions than in the past. I guess my harping on getting into the text to find the answers is finally sinking in!
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