The testing problem

My second son got the results from his high school entrace exam. The news was mixed.

The good news was that he did high average on his math. Thank you Saxon and Grandma!

He also did well on his language arts (although punctuation and spelling remain problematic. I forsee another round of Easy Grammar in the future for this young man!

The surprising bad news was that he scored so poorly on reading. Sam is not a poor reader. He read Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham last year and can read his own math and history books. He can also tell me what happened, what the moral of the story is and other things that show me that he is comprehending what he has read.

This weekend I was taking my son and his friend home from their soccer game and they were talking about the test. My son’s friend did a lot better on the test, but I know his school grades are about average. It occurred to me then that the problem may be not in Sam’s ability to read and comprehend, but rather in his inexperience at taking tests!

Sam’s friend told me that the 8th grade class in this parochial school has given up study hall for the past three weeks just so that they could do more testing. They had a class on test strategies. Sam on the other hand, was surprised to discover that there was a time limit and that he could not work until he had tried every problem!

As I thought about it, I remember hearing parents and teachers at soccer games, art classes, community center and church complaining about all the testing their children were doing and how school seemed to focus around doing well on the tests.

I’m going to incorporate more analogies, logic and other critical thinking skills into our curriculum. While I don’t want my homeschool to revolve around test taking, I do think I need to prepare my students better on the art of taking standardized tests.

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