Test-Prep Nitty Gritty

There are still some people out there who think that getting students to pass high-stakes tests is a way to maintain high expectations so they'll wind up learning more -- no pain, no gain, right?

But that's only true if the test is a reasonable reflection of what makes educational sense for the students. At a recent public forum in Somerville, Massachusetts about the Massachusetts state test, high school teacher Kate Bunker explained how she goes about trying to prepare students who speak very little English for the test. The Massachusetts test is used under No Child Left Behind to rate schools, but it's also a graduation test -- she's trying to help these kids get a high school diploma. Here's an excerpt from what she said. See if you think the time and effort they put into this will help them in any other situation than taking this test. (She'd be the first to say, No! But she doesn't have a choice.)

"First, I want to say that I'm just speaking for myself, not representing the Somerville Public Schools, just myself and how I've been preparing the foreign students to pass the [state test]. ...

"The long composition is about a piece of literature that they have read previously. That's 20 points. I try and encourage the kids, you know, out of a possible 20, maybe you can get 14. Maybe you can get a 10. So that they don't give up. Because a lot of kids will just give up, faced with the fact that they have to write a few paragraphs about a novel. It is really pretty tough.

"Some students come to my class not knowing the past tense, barely knowing English, and they had to take the exam in November.

[One strategy we taught] was changing the prompt into an introductory sentence. We went for weeks and weeks crossing out the part of the question that was a prompt, and then highlighting in yellow the words that they would reuse. I don't know -- does that sound crazy? -- and they got it.

"For example, 'From a piece of literature you have read, in or out of school, select…' We crossed that all out. '…a character with the ability to inspire or lead others.' And we crossed out all the rest. And then we would say, 'Forrest Gump, from the book Forrest Gump, was a character with the ability to inspire or lead others.' This is primitive! It may sound very shocking, but I got the kids who barely knew any English to be able to do that -- to recognize what was a prompt and what was content, and then rework it. So this is the level that I was dealing on."

--Alain Jehlen