Describe the strengths and weaknesses of the plan described in this chapter for improving state test scores.
This chapter Improving State Test Scores with the Super Improver Team has shown many key points to educating students for standardized tests. One of the biggest points was the tennis comparison; we cannot expect our students to play a great game of tennis when we only allow them to practice a few times a year! This set my brain in motion. Throughout the year, it is expected that we measure our student’s growth through tests that ‘look like’ the state tests, with the end of the year tests being the biggest of measures. Practice is what they need, but we can’t give them a test every day. So how do we help supply the needed skills? We must teach proper test taking skills, analysis, and high order thinking in order to allow these skills to become what is known to athletes as muscle memory.
I am a huge fan of the weekly layouts to teach students the skills needed for exemplar answers.
Week 2-6: Prove It! + Show Work is a way to eliminate wrong answers by proving why an answer is correct and the other answers are incorrect. We started using this last year in my math class and this was HUGE! It seemed tedious to the students but it really helped them see how to think critically about a multiple choice question and select the best answer.
Week 7-12: Prove It! + Show Work + Doofus/Trickster/Smarty is a great way to not only have the students prove answers correct and incorrect but then label these answers with Doofus, Triskster, or Smarty. This skill has been taught for years but the names of the answers are fun and engaging! The Doofus is the obvious wrong answer, the Trickster is and answer that is almost right and the Smarty is the correct answer.
Week 13-18: Prove It! + Show Work + Doofus/Trickster/Smarty + Double Underlining adds in a key component to test taking strategies. In traditional test taking, we tell students to underline key information or phrases. This strategy adds to this. Students must read a second time and underline the most important information. Oh Yeah!!
Week 19-36: Prove It! + Show Work + Doofus/Trickster/Smarty + Double Underlining + Headings teaches students they need to fill in the following headings of Key words, key numbers, operations (+, -, x, /) procedures, and showing their work. Only after this is finished is their work finished. Ten Finger WOO!
The drawbacks to these strategies I find would be the time it would take to have students go through each of these steps for each problem on a worksheet or test. While saying this, I also believe that sometimes the amount of problems we expect students to do can be overwhelming. Our current district assessments must match the other teachers’ in our grade level. This would make it difficult to just cut out certain problems. Also, I wonder if this would lengthen the time students are completing the State Assessment. For some this would be great to cause them to slow down, yet others take much longer as it is and they would be extending their time. On certain parts of the test this is okay, but I wonder how they would do on the timed portion. Even with time being a drawback, I will be implementing these strategies since they seem to be so powerful!
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