Tag: tests

“Cheat Sheets”

A selection of "cheat sheets".

I let my students bring in one page of handwritten notes, a “cheat sheet” if you will, into their last Physics exam. I’d expected to see some very tiny writing, but some of the notes needed scientific-grade magnification equipment to be read. Seen from a distance, the dense writing did have a certain aesthetic appeal.

Of course the primary reason for letting students bring in the cheat sheets into the exam was to get them to practice taking notes. At one extreme, the students who already take good notes benefit from having to condense them. At the other extreme, the students who don’t take notes at all get a strong incentive to practice. The very act of preparing cheat sheets is a good way to study for exams.

And it worked. As they hand in their papers I usually ask them how the test went, and, this time, I also asked a few student if they found their page of notes useful. One student in particular responded, Well I didn’t need to use it after making it.

Cheat sheets laid out according to note-taking style. Two extremes of note taking styles are highlighted. Equations and diagrams to the left, and text-only to the right.

It was also very interesting to see the different styles of note taking: the strategic use of color; densely packed text; equations; diagrams; columnar organization. What all this means, I’m not sure. I’m particularly interested in how their note taking style relates to students’ preferred learning style.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see if the note taking style co-relates in any way with students’ performance on the test. One could hypothesize that, since we know that students learn better when they encounter material from multiple perspectives, then students whose notes have the greatest mix of styles — diagrams, equations, text etc. — should have learned more (and perhaps perform better on the test).

It’s a pretty simple and crude hypothesis, since there are likely many other factors that affect test performance, but it would still be interesting to look at.

Physical geography in the sand

Instead of doing the Island of Podiatry in the sandbox, I decided add a practical exercise as part of their Social World test.

Spits, deltas, archipelagos and more.

Half the class, the first to finish the written portion of the test, were instructed, as a group, to create as many physiographic features as they could in the sandbox. Tomorrow, the other half will have to try to identify as many features as they can.

The first group did a very good job. The kids seemed to enjoy working with the sand, and little details, like the difference between a bay and a gulf, quickly became apparent.

It’ll be interesting to see how the other half does with identification. I could not prevent myself from adding a fjord and cirque even though we have not seen them in class. The fjord should at least be recognized as a valley (definitely a steep sided valley), but hopefully this will allow a moment to talk about post-glacial features. Of course, thinking about it, I should probably add a moraine or subsurface ridge to complete the set.

Physical geography in the sand.

Dealing with test anxiety

Afghan college entrance exam day. From Wikimedia Commons.

In the middle school our students have to take tests. While it’s not quite as bad as the Afghan college entrance exam, there’s the annual standardized test, and then there are the cycle tests every six weeks. Even with the cycle tests, some students have test anxiety. They see a math test with almost identical questions to the ones they have been doing perfectly for weeks and they freeze. I asked Ms. P. to look into strategies for dealing with test anxiety, and as usual, she came up with an excellent list of links.

Her favorite, which I also like, is Penn State’s University Learning Center’s Test Taking and Test Anxiety website. They, however, appear to have gone missing, but Effective Study’s How To Overcome Test Anxiety seems a good alternative. TeensHealth’s page is also good and aimed at a younger audience, although there is not much difference in the level of the writing for a middle schooler. If you need a clear list of things to do before and during the test, Study Guides and Strategies has an excellent page.

These sites tend to recommend preparing well and using relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing, during the test.

Other resources:

Exams in Jaura, India (from Wikimedia Commons)

Good teachers …

How do you know if you’re a good teacher is a question we all ask ourselves as we go through the Montessori teacher training and when we reflect on our time in the classroom. Most of us do not come from traditional educational backgrounds. Angeline Stoll Lillard (2007; p. 379), who literally wrote the book on the cognitive and pedagogic research that supports the Montessori approach, writes that in 1946 Maria Montessori “advised that Montessori teachers not take traditional education courses, because such courses would deepen their adherence to traditional methods and ideas.”

Lillard’s own belief is that although educational training programs have improved since the 1940’s (they teach more constructivist methods similar to Montessori) new teachers going into traditional schools today get pounded down by the institutional structure of these schools (the traditional classroom layout, the testing etc.) so that they are rarely able to apply those approaches and end up falling back into the traditional methods. Interestingly, according to an article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic, “a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.” (at least within the Teach for America program). The Teach for America research found that the key traits that predicted a teacher would be good are contentedness with their own life and perseverance.

Of course you have to ask yourself, how do they determine if a teacher is a good teacher? Unfortunately, they do it through standardized test scores. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, because evaluating good teaching is important and difficult to put into numbers. Even crude measures of the quality of teaching can be useful if there is no other available evidence. But increasing the uses of standardized tests has a tendency to shape the entire educational system toward the test itself. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that a focus on testing is not a good way to get students to learn. It devalues the learning to the student, and focuses the attention of the teacher on the test, and, “The very structure of such tests, breaking learning into components that are tested in a disjointed manner, discourages integrated learning” (Lillard, 2005; p 344).

Yet the focus on testing intensifies. In Washington D.C., teachers are now being scored and potentially fired based on test scores. According to Ripley, teaching quality will now be numerically scored, and for “teachers whose students take standardized tests, half their score will be based on how much their students improved.” At the federal level, there is a new educational initiative where:

states must first remove any legal barriers to linking student test scores to teachers—something California and Wisconsin are already doing. To win money, states must also begin distinguishing between effective and ineffective teachers—and consider that information when deciding whether to grant tenure, give raises, or fire a teacher or principal

The two sentences above are separated by a period into two different ideas, but their confluence appears to be inexorable. While testing should be a component of evaluation, test scores are easy to use and come in the form of easy to understand numbers, so the over-reliance on them seems inevitable.

While there is a clear need to identify good teaching and teachers, I do not believe that standardized tests are the answer.