I snatched this comments from the Jose Vilson blog. It’s related to my last post and his
Check it out. I think it’s pretty insightful.
Re: teaching to tests. In doing so, we give students the permission to forget. By saying you need to know this for the test implies that you don’t need to know it anywhere else. I am not at all shocked that students forget what they once knew for a big test. We live in a memorize, spew out, and forget educational culture. Still.
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.
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