’Tis the Season of Test Prep: Bah Humbug
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14 December, 2024
18 Comments
Blast from the Past: Usually, “Blasts from the Past” are re-postings of earlier blogs, with minimal revision. This one is a bit different. This time I’ve combined and revised two earlier postings (December 8, 2018; January 19, 2019). Each year, I receive numerous requests from teachers seeking ways to prepare their students to excel on the accountability tests or to resist their school district’s pressure to do a lot of test prep. Although it is only December, those letters have already started to come in. I think this is the earliest ever!
Teacher question:
We’ve been given a directive to provide plans/resources to “support schools in preparing students for these high-stakes tests.” Our ELA team is discouraged by this ask. We joked that we’d create a document that just said, “stay the course-and teach word recognition to those who are not yet reading at grade level.” The district is looking at data to determine areas of need. This leads us down a slippery slope that often ends with schools forming main idea reteaching groups, and inference groups, etc. What advice do you have for us?
Shanahan response:
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten up on this soapbox.
Many consider this “the season to be jolly,” but for schools the kickoff for heavy test prep is soon to begin.
Your district wants to “use the data” or to create “data driven classrooms.” They have been told, without evidence, that approach will allow them to shine on the annual accountability tests.
I appreciate the hopefulness behind this practice, but I have one small concern…. The fact that it doesn’t work….
These so-called test score improvement experts who promulgate these ideas don’t seem to mind that their recommendations contradict both the research (e.g., Langer, 2001) and successful educational policy and practice.
Their “theory”—and it is just a theory—is that one can raise reading scores through targeted teaching of specific comprehension skills. Teachers are to use the results of their state accountability tests to look for fine-grained weaknesses in reading achievement—or to identify which educational standards the kids aren’t meeting.
This idea makes sense in math, perhaps. If kids perform well on the addition and subtraction problems but screw up on the multiplication ones, then focusing more heavily on multiplication can work.
But reading comprehension questions are a horse of a different color. There is no reason to think that practicing answering types of comprehension questions would improve test performance.
Question types are not skills (e.g., main idea, supporting details, drawing conclusions, inferencing). In math, 3x9 is going to be 27 every doggone time. But the main idea of a short story? That is going to depend upon the content of the story and how the author constructed the tale. In other words, the answer is going to be different with each text.
Practicing skills is fine, but if what you are practicing is not repeatable, then it is not a skill.
The test makers know this. Look at any of the major tests (e.g., SBAC, PARCC, AIR, SAT, ACT). They will tell you that their test is based upon the educational standards or that their questions are consistent with those standards. But when they report student performance, they provide an overall reading comprehension score, with no sub-scores based on the various question types.
Why do they do it that way?
Because it is impossible to come up with a valid and reliable score for any of these question types. ACT studied it closely and found that question types didn’t determine reading performance. Texts mattered but question types didn’t. In fact, they concluded that if the questions were complex and the texts were simple, readers could answer any kind of question successfully; but if the questions were simple and the texts were hard, the readers couldn’t answer any question types.
Reading comprehension tests measure how well students can read a collection of texts—not how well they can answer different types of questions.
If your principal really wants to see better test performance, there is a trick that I’m ready to reveal here.
The path to better reading scores? Teach kids to read.
It works like magic.
Kids don’t do well on the tests because we don’t spend enough time on those things that make a difference in making kids proficient. Most American elementary schools these days pride themselves on their 90-minute reading blocks… but much of that time is devoted to activities that do little to promote reading ability. Kids are supposedly reading independently or doing shut-up-sheets while the teachers are working with the other kids.
I’d love it if instead of a 90-minute block, we’d commit to providing 90 minutes of teaching and guided practice to each child each day. That might take more than 90 minutes to deliver, but it would sure give kids a better chance to become proficient.
In my schools, I required 120-180 minutes per day of reading and writing instruction. I know that’s a lot, but it is accomplishable in most schools if they ditch the test prep and reading activities that don’t contribute much.
This instructional time should be devoted to explicit teaching and guided practice aimed at developing knowledge of words (including phonemic awareness, phonics, letter names, spelling, morphology, vocabulary); oral reading fluency (accuracy, automaticity, prosody); reading comprehension (written language, strategies, knowledge); and writing (transcription, composition). And, for English learners (and perhaps poverty kids too)—explicit oral language teaching.
Too many teachers think kids would be better off reading on their own than working with them because “reading is learned by reading.” Kids do need to read, but that practice is best included in reading lessons than pushed away. I encourage devoting at least half the instructional time to reading and writing.
In a reading comprehension lesson, there will be teacher-led demonstrations and explanations and guided discussion, and so on—but the students should also be reading text. The same is true for decoding; during a big chunk of that instruction kids should be decoding and encoding words.
In grade 2 and up, students spend too much time working with books they can already read reasonably well. There is no such thing as an “instructional level” in reading, at least beyond first grade. Teaching kids at their supposed “reading levels” hasn’t been found to facilitate learning but lowers the sophistication and complexity of the content and language they get to work with.
We do too little to develop students’ reading stamina. Oh, I know that some are proud that they use books instead of short stories to teach reading, or that many assign extended silent reading. But those tend to be sink-or-swim propositions. Kids would be better prepared for tests (and many real reading situations) if there was an intentional regimen of stretching how long they can persist in making sense of texts. For many, having to read an extended fourth-grade selection silently to answer questions doesn’t go so well since they’ve never done anything that demanding before.
Lack of a knowledge-focused curriculum is an important culprit, too. Science and social studies aren’t given enough time in elementary school (and the value of the literature may be suspect, as well). Kids should get daily work in those subjects, and those lessons should include the reading of content text.
Nothing very exciting here, right?
If you want higher test scores, it takes a lot of dedicated teaching of the key things that matter in learning. Nothing sexy about it. Yet too few kids get those things and test prep is not a replacement. Focus like a laser on what works, and your kids will do better.
References
ACT. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City, IA: ACT, Inc.
Langer, J. A. (2001). Beating the odds: Teaching middle and high school students to read and write well. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 837-880.
Shanahan, T. (2015). Let’s get higher scores on these new assessments. The Reading Teacher, 68, 459-463.
Shanahan, T. (2014). How and how not to prepare students for the new tests. The Reading Teacher, 68, 184-188.
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Our school is piloting thinkSRSD, a writing program that explicitly teaches, models and practices responding to high level prompts for texts that have been previously read from the ELA curriculum. Our third grade teacher (who has been doing thinkSRSD from the beginning of the year), now wants to switch to preparing for the state tests. She plans on continuing with the same weekly thinkSRSD format, but using text sets specifically written for text prep by Wonders. However, our curriculum director wants her to continue using the CKLA texts to respond to high level prompts. My questions, "Does it matter which texts she uses? Is it better to continue reading grade-level complex texts, and practicing how to plan, organize and write effective responses to high level prompts? Or, is it better to use prepared text sets, presumably grade-level and complex, and practice how to plan, organize and write effective responses to high level prompts?"
Carol--
I don't think we know the answer to that (I know of no data on that). Although I'm not a fan of most prep, teaching students to be responsive to a writing prompt has value beyond testing (even professional writers are given writing assignments that they need to respond to which they must respond appropriately). In this case, I would probably make my choice on the basis of (1) which texts are the highest quality in terms of content and writing and level -- yes, I favor grade level text in terms of length, linguistic complexity, and appropriateness of content?, and (2) which scheme seems most likely to guide students to become independent in their ability to respond to a prompt -- which one will end up with the kids gaining enough metacognitive awareness that they will be able to negotiate the prompt on their own without the external support.
tim
Test- prep combined with bubble kid identification is the worst form of educational malpractice. But malpractice never deters educators who focus on self over service rather than service to students and families!
Billy--
I wish I could disagree with you on that. I wonder how many teachers and principals recognize that those approaches are doing just that -- putting the educators' needs/desires over the kids' needs?
tim
What Are your thoughts?
Leave me a comment and I would like to have a discussion with you!
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