Test Stress

Posted in Standards and EvaluationDemEd in Real Life on Jan 20, 2010 - 10:05 PM

EEEK! Finals!

Finals…I type ‘em, they take ‘em. They stress, I correct.

No, it is much more than that. I sit down and try to create a test that is fair and relevant. I pull from the most important Spanish grammar concepts, the most used (or useful) vocabulary I have taught, and the most interesting stories we have read, and create questions that get to the heart of the matter.

I am required by my school to provide a culminating task that is relevant to the class. I am required by my department to provide a written test. I have nearly two hundred students. To maintain any sanity at all, I give a multiple guess final. Oh, make that multiple choice…

Supposedly, if students do well on this test they know the material, they know Spanish. Well, First Semester Spanish One, at my high school, anyway.

Really? Sometimes.

In reality, I think it can mean a lot of things.:

The student knows what I have taught, inside and out. We may have come to the same decisions about what is important in the curriculum. We might value those same things.

The kiddo might test like a pro! It happens! Some of us rock on tests; all it takes is a little bit of pressure and we can fly. These kids know how tests are written, though they don’t always have a firm grip on content.

 

Many of the kids cram. They spend the week before the test force feeding vocab and grammar into their brain. In the lower levels of a World Language, this is possible. The amount of information the student will be tested on is small enough that a good cram session could fit the bill! The information gets shoved in, and just as quickly, falls right out. This doesn’t get them any closer to knowing the language, but it gets a decent grade on the test and probably their transcripts as well. Hey, we are all doing what we are doing for different reasons…. that’s cool.

In the end, most students do as well on the final as they have done all semester. There are a few kids that “pull a rabbit out of a hat” and get better grades on the test than their grades up to this point. There are a few.

For most of my students, I don’t think this kind of assessment is valid.

What to do?

1. I am weighing the final as I would any chapter test, instead of making the final worth the traditional 10% of the student’s grade.

2. I make a spoken portion of the exam so that a student can’t memorize. They read one of several stories, and answer questions aloud. The student knows the questions ahead of time, but hasn’t yet read the story. This test carries the same weight as the written exam. But it doesn’t carry the same amount of stress.

It isn’t perfect…but I feel it gives me a better indication of where the students really are at that point in time.

Just looking for wiggle room in a very tight system.
Be well!
Alison

 

Tags for this entry:
k-12 education, grades, alternative assessment, stress, testing

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