Suppose a parent of
one of your students called you today to complain about his/her child's poor
performance on your classroom tests. The parent concludes by asking you,
"Just how sure are you the fault is in my child and not in your tests?"
How would you respond
to this parent? What would you think about? Justify your response.
This is a very
interesting question. Two weeks ago, I would have been able to stand firm on
the opinion that the fault was neither in my teaching nor my tests but in the child.
After taking a look at the rules for creating effective tests, I realized that
many of my small mistakes can affect the student learner. I haven’t always
taken the time to outline the objectives that I will teach and match them up
with the questions that I put on the test. My multiple choice answers were not
always in columns. As I reflect upon this, I can recall students placing the
wrong answer on the line or even circling the wrong answer. For many students,
we just called it a “careless mistake” with my knowledge as the teacher that
they knew the information. However, that mistake may have been the difference
between a letter grade.
As far as a response
to the parent, I will probably suggest that this be a conversation we have the
student together. This will give me an opportunity to listen to the student’s
feedback on their previous exams. It may be best to take an exam that the
student did poorly on and go through the correct and incorrect answers while
having the students to justify the incorrect answers. This would provide the
student to explain any questions that they may not understand or acknowledge
that they knew the answer but may have circled the incorrect answer. I would
hope this will give me an idea of whether it’s the knowledge of the student or
my exam.
I feel the same way. Prior to the last few lessons in class, I was pretty much ignorant as to the rules of assessing students properly. I guess I thought I knew what I was doing, but boy was I wrong. Now, I feel I could look at a test and knowing the rules have an intelligent conversation with a student and/or parent regarding the material and the justification. I have even looked at some of the tests my book provided and they don't even follow the rules, so I am much more aware now of how this can truly affect student achievement.
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