Practical Advice for Your Student - Part 3 - Test Taking

In spite of the grade controversies you might see on Twitter, tests are an important part of learning.  It is important for a teacher to know if students have knowledge or can perform a skill on their own without teacher support.  They also provide an opportunity for retrieval practice, and important part of solidying memories.  

That's not to say they cannot be improved.  It would take too long to grade and give feedback for every question to be free response, especially for those teachers who have classes of up to 35 students.  So we are left with things like matching, multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc. for the sake of efficiency.  Much of the test taking advice you see online (like choose C because it is the most common right answer - which isn't even true anymore) are for those who don't have a clue about the right answer.  If you have studied, it is unlikely that you don't know anything at all.  So the advice in this post is for the conscientious student who prepared for the test.

Multiple Choice Questions

When I met with students, I asked them if they were the kind of person who quickly picked an answer and moved on or if the kind who talked themselves into every answer.  For both, I first offer this advice.  Bring a blank index card (you can also use a cover sheet if provided or even your hand) to cover the choices.  Read the question first and think of the answer in your mind.  Then, go look for the right answer.  The only type of question this won't work for are those where "all of the above" is the right answer, but there are usually only 1 or 2 of those on any given test.  For those who tend to talk themselves into the other choices, they don't even have to look at the others (maybe jump down to quickly to make sure "all of the above" isn't a choice).  For those who choose answers quickly, they will at least be more likely to be committing themselves to the right answer.

If, when you thought of then answer, you had some doubts, you can then go to look at the choices.  My next best advice is to cross out those you know to be wrong.  Then, go on to another question.  When you return to the one you had doubts about, you may find that your mind has continued in diffuse mode, allowing you to be confident about one of the answers you have left.

Short Answer Questions

It is easy to write something without really thinking about it.  I can't tell you how many times I have written next to an answer, "Read this out loud.  You'll hear that it doesn't make sense."  That's not me being mean; it's just easy to write without checking to see if it says what you meant.  You obviously can read your answers out loud during a test with other students around.  However, you can do two things.  First, you can do what I call "Reading out loud in your head." What I mean by that is rather than passively taking the words into your eyes, be intentional about "pronouncing" the words in your mind.  I think it is called "self talk," and it helps.  The other thing you can try is to ask the teacher if you can step into the hall and actually read the answer out loud so you can hear it.  I wouldn't do it a lot, but it could help if you are really stuck on a question.

The Order of the Test

Because we number the questions, students assume they must start with question 1 and go in order.  The problem with that is that the most challenging questions are often on the last page.  Because of the benefits of moving from focused node to diffuse mode, the best advice is to start with the hardest ones. Recognize when it is time to pause and go on to some easier questions, so you can return to them after your brain has had time for active recovery.  The other benefits to doing it this way are that you are able to time your pace better when the easier ones are the ones that are left and you don't already have an exhausted brain when your reach the free response section.

Data - Can You Have Too Much of a Good Thing?

When I was growing up, I had an excellent pastor.  He was deeply insightful, and he handled the preaching of God's Word with intelligence.  He showed me what it meant to love God with all my mind.  There was one area of his life, however, where he did not apply the same level of intellect - his eating habits.  He loved snacks, but he was also very concerned about his appearance.  So he weighed himself - a lot.  He weight himself before he consumed anything and decided what to eat based on that number, resulting in unusual things, like eating half an Oreo and three peanuts for lunch.  This, friends, is the weird result of too much access to data.

You may be wondering what I am going on about in a blog that is meant to be about education.  Well, anyone who has been around education in the past 5 years or so knows that we have become obsessed with data.  Some schools even proudly market themselves with the term "data driven." We analyze every standardized test score (in spite of research showing they are not predictive of success), monitor GPAs, and act reactively to the slightest deviations in the bell curve.  Some parents hover over the school's digital reports of every grade, big or small, and contact the teacher over every lost point.  Much like my pastor's strange food decisions that no dietician would ever support, our obsession with academic data leads to strange educational decisions that are not based on good pedagogy.

I'm not saying we swing the pendulum back too far the other direction.  There was a time when we had almost no access to data.  Students and parents found out what the grade was when report cards came out.  At that point, it was too late to adjust course in any way.  That is too little access to data.  Neither of these extremes is helpful to the education or flourishing of students.  So, what is the sweet spot?

Let me try to make a comparison outside of the academia.  As you all know, I take and teach indoor cycle classes at the YMCA.  A few months after I started taking cycle classes, I began setting goals about distance, tension level, and power on the bike.  At first, I only knew how to check these statistics at the end of a class. I was often surprised to get to the end of a workout and find that I hadn’t achieved as much distance as I had thought or that my average speed was lower than I had mentally calculated.  Because I wasn’t tracking that information at all during the class, I didn’t have the ability to make adjustments that would help me reach my goals.  This is the workout equivalent of our world prior to digital grade access. I could do better on a different day, but I didn’t know how to do better in real time. 

Then, an instructor showed me how to use the bike’s computer to see real time information during class by changing the display screens.  It was tempting to stay on the screen with the information I cared most about.  After all, feedback is good, right?  I quickly learned that was unwise.  It made me so focused on the number that I couldn’t pay attention to instructions.  Worse, I was so focused on the number that I couldn’t enjoy doing the things that would improve the number, and I was in a state of stress if the average didn’t move as quickly as I thought it should.  Worst of all, I wasn’t building any internal sense of how to improve because I was relying too much on the bike itself rather than how my legs felt or how hard I was working.  This is the equivalent of reacting to every homework and quiz grade in real time. Students aren't able to enjoy learning or focus on how to learn well because they are too focused on each and every point.

Eventually, in those cycle classes, I learned to discipline myself to only visit that screen once every four minutes.  That gave me enough information to figure out what I need to do to make progress for the next four minute check, but it didn’t do my thinking for me. I could see if I was building an internal sense of how I was doing by making a mental prediction of where I would be before going to check the number. I could enjoy the music and the instructor because I wasn't staring constantly at the numbers on the screen. Teachers and parents should keep in mind that a grade is an average for a reason.  This will prevent us from overreacting to every task score.  Parents who check the average with every entry cause themselves a lot of unnecessary stress and raise the anxiety level of their children.  Perhaps, parents and students could make checking the LMS part of a weekly routine, checking it on Fridays in order to make a plan for the following week. Perhaps that's the sweet spot between too much data and no data at all.

Let's recognize that, like most complex endeavors, education is multifaceted. It has layers of purposes and goals, and there are many aspects of schooling that don't show up in data reports.  Grade data is ONE facet, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Standardized tests exist for a reason, but we go too far when we assume they show anything other than a snapshot of learning.  Evaluating a school on standardized test scores ALONE would be equivalent to judging a movie based solely on the poster.  Just because data is easy to check doesn't mean we should think it shows us everything we need to know.  Data doesn't include classroom climate, student attitudes toward learning, growth across time, use of resources, support of struggling learners, or how alumni prosper as a result of our having taught them.  

Water is a good thing, but when there is too much of it, you can drown.  

Data's a good thing, but let's not drown ourselves in too much of it.