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About Me
- Robert Hankes
- PSPA President; PSPA Literary Magazines Evaluation Chair for many years; teaches at Big Spring HS in Newville, PA; co-advises the literary magazine Charisma with PSPA Vice-President Mike McVitty; married with three kids (23, 9, and 6).
4 comments:
I have a large number of students with IEP's this semester, and I noticed that most of my struggling readers were done with the test first. After administering the Benchmark Test, we talked a bit about how they read the passages. Many, if not most of the weaker readers, may read the first passage in its entirety, but they get tired and start reading only parts of the others. They tend to read the first part of a passage, and when they get tired or bored, they skip to the end of the passage and read the last paragraph. Just an observation for now, but this is a real problem.
We're using Benchmarks in order to prepare students for the state test. We’ve been looking at what types of items our students are missing, and then developing lessons to remediate them in these areas. It has proven to be interesting, but the problem is that we’re focusing on trees at the expense of the forest.
I believe reading to be more of a holistic construct. In other words, when a student reads a passage, they either comprehend it to some level or they don’t. Usually when reading ability is measured, a passage is given followed by questions that supposedly tap various reading skills associated with comprehension; questions are given to measure inference, making predictions, analyzing characters’ motivations, main idea, etc. It is my contention that if the passage is too difficult, the students won’t be able to answer the questions; if you lower the high jump bar, they will. To illustrate this a bit, Drahozal, a psychometrician for Iowa Test of Basic Skills, performed an exhaustive item analysis on the ITBS hoping to ferret out these different reading skills. In short, it was a wash. In other words, students either understood the passage or they didn’t. He couldn’t isolate these individual skills.
I’m performing two simple studies. We just finished one Benchmark. I’m going to administer a simpler form of the Benchmark (5-6 grade level) to see if overall scores go up. My assumption is that they will. However, if you can isolate and teach specific skills, then those students who are missing the inference questions on the initial test, should have difficulty with the inference questions on the test with easier passages because the assumption here is that making inferences is a particular skill that needs to be mastered.
A second and related study is that for two of these classes, I’m going to directly address the specific skills that most of these students have missed such as making inferences. The third class will serve as my control group. After two weeks of intervention, I’m going to give another Benchmark that is equivalent to the first one. If teaching isolated skills is useful, then students should perform better on the retest. I do realize that my students may want to lynch me by the time they get the third test, and that this may impact the study, but they realize that this is part of an experiment and most likely will give it an honest try. We’ll see.
In response to the first comment about how students actually take the test, I wonder if students would do better if we only administered one passage per day and spread the test out. Just a thought.
When the students take the benchmarks, I take the test with them in order to see what they're looking at and in order to better understand where we're having problems as a group. However, I found that a number of my students, especially those with IEP's, were completed with the test before I was. When we were all through, I asked them what "strategies" they were using in order to complete the test. About 1/3 said that they read the passages and answered the questions. Another 1/3 said that they read until they get tired or bored, and then they'll either go to the last paragraph or go to the questions. Finally, the last 1/3 said they just go straight to the questions and look for the answers in the passages without ever really reading the passages. Part of this is because the students are getting test weary, and part of it may be because the test passages themselves aren't always that interesting. But the biggest problem is that we're trying to measure reading comprehension ability and the students aren't even taking the time to read the passages which makes me wonder if we're really measuring anything useful at all.
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