BLogarithm

My students, for the most part, are pretty damn sharp. They pick up on concepts quickly and can generally learn to apply learned concepts in new situations.

However, their one weakness…their only major shortcoming is their mastery of what is considered to be “Standard English.”

The students I and spent the last 5 weeks learning about probability, permutations, factorials, set theory,  the meaning of And vs. Or, etc. And they have been rocking it. They can create their own Venn diagrams displaying all the concepts of set theory…they can determine sample space, recognize when to use a factorial vs. the counting principle, and have no problems determining probability of independent events.

But they still bombed my test.

They did so because the test was not created by me ( one of the benefits of being in a Needs Improvement school) so they were not used to the language of the test. I did not see the test until the week before I was to give it so I didn’t have as much time as I needed to tailor my lessons/review sessions to the new language of the test.

Math teachers, test creators, and designers often don’t realize what they’re doing to inner city kids when the language of a test is purposely convoluted and confusing. I realize that this is supposed to force kids to think, however, it isn’t really testing their mastery of the mathematical concepts is it ?

Too often standardized math tests are really literacy tests dressed in math test clothing and I’m so tired of it.

My students often ask me why I phrased a question or a task in a particular way.  For instance I may ask students to represent { the letters in the word “thin” that are also in the word “hat”} as a roster. They have been introduced to the word roster, but it isn’t part of their everyday language. When I explain to them that a roster is another word for list…they always say…”why didn’t you just ask us to represent the information as a list?”

As much I hate to admit it to them…they’re absolutely correct in their assessment of the phrasing of questions. If we want kids to do something we should ask them in as plain a way as possible. They can then demonstrate what it is that we want them to do.

I wonder if test designers take into account the life experiences and language of all students or if tests are simply tailored to the assumed experiences of test takers. I wonder if so many of our students are failing standardized tests because the standard to which these tests are written are exclusionary.

I do not advocate teaching to tests. I hate the idea of teaching to a test. I try to give my students as many experiences as possible. However, with my students I have to tailor my lessons to the language of the test since the language of the test is not part of their everyday patterns of speech.

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