6 Questions Your Student Needs to be Able to Answer: Excuse Me?
A ten-year-old student was shocked when a substitute teacher handed back a recently scored pop quiz. To his surprise, he was awarded an “F” missing 10 out of 10 points. One question missed went something like this: Katie went to the store to buy flour for her mother. She found a one-pound sack of flour for $.40 and a five-pound sack for $1.65. Which was a better buy?
Feeling proud that he had broken the question apart and analyzed it thoroughly, the student had come up with a creative solution and stated that both answers could be right given the limited information provided. For instance, nothing was said about how many family members there were which would affect the consumption rate, or if the bag could be stored properly so as to avoid spoilage and bugs, and how much money Katie had at the time, etc. The teacher initially listened politely as he defended his answer to her, but she soon grew impatient referring to the teacher manual, the final seat of authority, which said unequivocally that the right answer was the five-pound sack!
The student asked to see the teacher manual for himself to which the teacher responded, “Don’t be ridiculous, then you would know all the answers.”
What was quickly becoming an argument, he answered back, “No, I would only know the so-called ‘right answers’ which you know, which would mean I wouldn’t really know anything at all. I’d be just like you.” His final remark became an immediate ticket to the principal’s office.
Bad attitude aside, sadly the teacher was not prepared to affirm a thought process that used analysis to reach a creative solution.
Questions that require analytical thinking will definetely be present on your student’s achievement test. Questions that require being able to analyze information is the 4th step on our staircase of steps I’ve been discussing recently.
The ability to think creatively and engage in problem solving begins with the skill of analysis or what educators call analytic thinking. Analytic thinking can be broken into three steps:
* Take things apart mentally
* Examine the parts and their relationship to each other
* Examine the parts and their relationship to the whole
Questions on achievement tests that require this kind of thinking might be framed like the following:
“What factors led to The Great Depression?”
“List some arguments that could support the notion of global warming as well as some arguments that could refute it”
“In what ways is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe typical of C.S. Lewis’s writing and in what ways is it unique?
“Given the following six numbers, identify the one that does not belong.”
All of the questions above require the student to sort information and take it apart mentally. They require him to examine it carefully noting patterns, relationships, and distinctions. They require him to creatively reorganize the pieces back into something he has perhaps never thought of with the result that his understanding will have been expanded.
At this point if you’ve read the posts leading up to this one, you might be feeling like there’s a lot more to the reading comprehension section on the achievement test than you thought. You would be right! Achievement test do more than simply measure the recall of facts. If you’d like to give your student some experience in answering questions that go beyond recall, pick up one of our One Hour Practice Tests, now available at 50% off when you register for one of our remote testing options.
Thanks for reading!
Curt Bumcrot, MRE
