Reponses to Discussion 4 CA
Minimum of a150 words per response
Discussion 1 Kelvin F
Chapter 6 enlightened me on how to construct various test items properly. The five item-writing commandments are crucial to good teachings. By understanding them, teachers learn that providing students with opaque directions on how they are supposed to respond to given assessments may influence their understanding. Notably, bad teaching involves setting a test that prepares students to fail. For this reason, understanding these items encourages teachers to avoid ambiguous statements that may confuse the students when responding to assessment items. Also, to effectively assess the students, teachers must not utilize more advanced vocabulary than required. I’ve been amid various teachers in the past who have carried out this method countless times. Hyper sophisticated vocabularies to a student may not only influence their reasoning but also may change the intended purpose of the test. For instance, the use of too many pronouns in a sentence may be unclear about the individual or individuals to whom the pronoun is referring.
Understanding these concepts will clarify and strengthened young inspired teachers like me that students must not be provided with unintentional clues on how they should respond to a particular test. By all means, teachers must internationally avoid clues to students. Inexperienced teachers, particularly those who do not know how to utilize the items, tend to make the correct answer to multiple-choice items twice. In such a case, even uninformed students are likely to pass the test. Even though teachers are required not to give clues to tests, they are also discouraged from using complex syntax in their assessments. Understanding the concepts in this chapter, teachers will learn not to use complicated sentences, and instead, use simple sentences to reduce confusion. In the long run, students will be able to answer the question correctly and still attain the required knowledge.
Chapter 7 provided me with the insight on when students are allowed to create their responses, rather than selecting from a package response, they improve their understanding and academic performance. Generally, the teacher’s work is to make students understand the concepts rather than finding the correct answer. for this reason, the use of a constructed response provides the student with access to the reasoning beyond finding solutions. While the benefits of multiple choices cannot be ruled out, constructed responses in teaching are needed for students to think beyond the basic knowledge to comprehension level. For example, due to a lack of cognitive follow-questions in the current education system, this encourages students to think in a shallow manner and adopt guesswork to pass an assessment. Also, while the curriculum of the day is expanding exponentially, teachers must adopt constructed responses to help apply information and appropriate level of sophistication as required.
In my opinion, to address issues in the real world, students must be taught how to critically utilize the required to synthesize a given situation. Unlike in the school environment, there are numerous solutions to a given problem in the real world. Therefore, preparing students to only surface-level knowledge is preparing them to fail to think deeper when addressing a complicated life situation. This can only be done through a constructed-response item. Teachers would be amused at how capable students are if given a chance to express their response instead of giving them multiple choices. It is imperative to note that providing students with numerous choices may limit their potentials. Teachers must adopt constructed responses items to allow the students to think thoroughly and critically.
Discussion 2 Bobbie S
When reading these segments what stood out most was the idea that as an educator one should always teach on a mastery level and challenge students to perform on an even higher level. Schools today are geared toward high performing test scores so much so that they use tested areas to determine the ranking of schools. In order to prepare students for these test teachers are held accountable for providing students with what they need to excel on these tests. How are teachers going to assure that this happens is the question? Preparing, planning, and preparation is a good place to start.
Challenging students is very important, if the teacher allows the student to due minimal work then the projected outcome will be minimal as well. As a student myself the expectation that I am looked upon to demonstrate is at the mastery level and it is a challenge daily to demonstrate this level, but the challenge to excel is demonstrated to me by my instructor and is expected of me by my instructor. Mastery level work takes effort and discipline by both the educator and the student.
Looking at challenging students on the mastery level from the educator’s point of view I am reminded of when I was given the opportunity to hold the position as a long term sub for a high school music class, and the students did not take this class seriously. The students view the class as an easy A with a minima amount of effort. Most of the students in the class were band students who should have really had a different view. I can remember preparing for the first test that I was going to be administering, and I really thought I had done an excellent job of teaching the lesson. The day before the test a student approached me and asked was the test going to be fill in the blank with a word bank or multiple choice. I was floored because these were high school students who expected to be tested on the elementary level. I explained to the class that the test would not be ether it would be discussion questions. Can you believe they were so disappointed, but I felt as if I was challenging them because of their age and grade level? Looking back and thinking about it after reading these lessons so far I’m asking myself did I prepare them to perform at that mastery level?
Discussion 3 Latonia B
One of the key ideas from the reading in Chapter 6 that resonated the most with me discussed preferred question types. Popham (2020) notes, “if you gravitate toward only one or two item types, then your students will tend to learn things only in a way that meshes with your favored item type” (p. 177). Along with this statement, much of the information in the entire chapter resonated with me. It caused me to think about even the work we have done so far with our written assignments. I already have ideas churning in my head to avoid writing tests with a preferred question type.
As I read the chapter, I thought about all the tests I have taken as a student. I wondered if my own teachers mainly used standard tests included with the unit lesson to avoid developing test questions that may have stimulated my classmates and myself to think a little more about the subject matter. Honestly, most of the tests I took as a student were multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and true/false type questions. Basically, we could literally cram this information just before the test and be able to pass the test.
After reading the chapter and the information in “But What Does This Have to Do with Teaching”, I realized the importance of developing test questions with the purpose of continuing and building on student learning. Also, Mr. Larson (Decision Time) had a very important decision to make after meeting with some parents of his students wondering why all his tests were in a multiple choice format. Just as one of the parents pointed out, “even weak students guess their way to good scores” with multiple choice type tests (Popham, 2020, p. 172).
Mr. Larson’s parents forced him to think “outside the box” when it comes to developing his tests. Our Department of Education provides us with the standards we need to provide daily instruction to our students; however, we must learn to think outside the box to teach the standards and develop tests to assess learning in more than one or two types of questions.
“But What Does This Have to Do With Teaching” in Chapter 7 brings out several key ideas in using constructed-response tests. One of the most essential, scoring and grading constructed response items, was something that made me think. How will I grade or score my students on essay type questions? Studying for tests involves more than learning the information for a “season” so to speak. To assess true learning, teachers may want to employ using essay type questions to get students to think critically about the question.
Honestly, as a student, I did not have much trouble with short-answer/essay type questions (as you can see by the length of some of my discussions, but I digress). As a future teacher, I believe constructed-response tests are just as important, if not, more important than selected-response tests. Selected-response tests allow students to study and retain information long enough to get them through the test and on to the next standard to be mastered. Constructed-response tests allow teachers to get an honest assessment of retention of student knowledge. Popham (2020) notes, constructed response tests “provide test takers with ample opportunities to invoke their originality” (p. 201).
After reading both chapters this week, I feel more confident in my ability to develop an assessment with questions using the various levels of rigor. Before now, I did not understand the importance of varying questions on assessments for students. Learning to develop assessments using constructed-response items also help students to be able to “coincide directly with what’s required of people in the real world” (p. 201).