Re: Way OT: Comic strip Pre Teena

Now here, I really agree with you Elizabeth. I did not see a True/False test or Multiple Choice until my kids were in school here in the USA. In UK, in my day, most tests were "real" tests; write a paragraph, solve a math problem, translate into,or from, French , write a short essay and so forth. All my 7 years of Med Tech training were on the same lines, including a lot of essay questions.

Multiple choice to my mind is a test of mediocrity. Most of them , even if you know little of the subject, a couple can be eliminated, leaving an intelligent guess or the right one. That is not deep knowledge!

Gill

Yep. One of our neighbors was a 4th grade teacher. I was younger, but some of his students had done so badly on a standardized test that he asked me to take the same test for comparison.

We went over my wrong answers. Knowing me, he knew there had to be some logic to how I came up with this answer over that one. Well, the TEST meant for me to analyze the meanings of the words for "which one doesn't fit"; little smarty-pants that I was, I looked at the words themselves, and concluded that these 3 all had Greek roots and that one was the odd-one-out because it was purely English. And "which is the best title for this article", I sure as heck wouldn't have picked up the article with the boring title ... the snappy one that wasn't quite as pertinent was, in my infinite wisdom, the "better" title because it was the only one that would actually get me to read it.

Thanks to his coaching that evening, I understood what the test was really looking for, and it was not necessarily what the instructions appeared to want.

And as I got to SAT age, I instantly noticed that the answers in the math section were 14.217, 142.17, 1421.7 and 6982.3. The latter being achieved by doing the wrong math function (e.g., adding instead of subtracting, multiplying instead of dividing). So you know right off that you can chuck 6982.3. Which, even if you know NOTHING else about math, has just improved your chances from 1/4 to 1/3 for guessing correctly.

And hopefully you have enough innate intelligence to realize that if you're dividing a 4 digit number by something larger than a single digit, there's no way you're coming up with a 4 digit number, so you can also chuck 1421.7, now improving your chance at guessing from 1/4 to 1/2.

LOL! You're another one that could do with a bit of investigation, Bruce!

My DH looks on with speechless amazement when he watches me or DD or my Ugly Sister read anything. We all read very fast, in hunks of text rather than word by word or sentence by sentence. I can't explain *how* we do it, but we do. Ugly and I will read an average novel in a night or two, where it takes DH a fortnight to wade through it. He says he actually enunciates the words in his head, but I couldn't possibly do that - it would slow me down far too much!

I feel lucky in that I don't have your problem: speeding ahead to get the gist of things. To me, half the pleasure of reading is the word-usage and description so I like to savour that as I go. Of course, if the text is boring then I'll merrily skip great hunks of it. I found that in LOTR - I really *hate* Tolkein's wordy, self-serving style of writing and found myself skipping wadges of 'padding' to get to the serious stuff.

I've heard that lots of people can be trained to use 'speed-reading' techniques, but if they don't practice the skill, it deteriorates. I don't find that, do you? I can still read speedily even after long gaps

- and they're getting more frequent as my eyesight goes down the dunny of increasing age.

Yeah, I'm sorry Olwyn Mary! I realised my post sounded strident as I hit the send button. I can see the point you were trying to make and apologise for coming on strong like that. I didn't mean to imply *you* made such comparisons, merely that 'the system' does. And yes, I agree: these abilities *do* seem to be inborn, but then, looked at another way, maybe not...?

I get so carried away with all this stuff - it means such a great deal to kids and teachers and caring parents and - well - The World, really! 'Progress' has become so vitally important, yet our education systems don't seem to be coping with it well enough for so many kids.

(Hee! I wish you *would* tell us your opinion on professional athletics

- I've got a strong hunch it would closely match my own! ;-> Might be safer not to, though?)

Perhaps it is an inate gift or talent. The first weekly comic I remember reading (aged about 4) was "Chicks Own" in which all the words were hy-phen-a-ted; my aunt told me that I was reading (and understanding) reports in the local newspaper when I was about 7 or 8 and I think that I first realised that I could read quickly when I got "The Children of the New Forest" (by Capt Maryatt) for my birthday (I was 11 or 12) and read the whole thing in one evening. Some people lack certain skills but make up for that by having other, different skills. I was taught to play the piano from the age of about 7 and (thanks to the RAF) was taught morse (21 wpm) and teleprinting (45 wpm) at the age of 16 ; I quickly picked up computer programming skills when I was in my 40s and even got a science degree (courtesy of the Open University) when I was 53. I was good at all these things because they seemed (to me) to be quite easy and straightforwards. However, I was and still am quite hopeless at anything really "practical" and worse than useless in anything requiring quick decisions, man-management (should that be person-management?) or arbitration. I'm definitely _not_ a leader, just a follower, a hewer of wood and a carrier of water... Bruce

"Bruce Fletcher wrote

I have essentially the same reading history. I also found that years at university habituated me to ploughing through a book whether or not I was enjoying it, right to the bitter end. My thesis advisors used to joke that they could tell exactly where in an article I would get furious and throw the book across the room (they picked those articles especially), but i also picked it up again and finished. I have a very hard time now putting a book aside and saying, this really isn't very good (but I'm practicing).

Did you also pick up reading upside down fairly readily?? I did, and found it very useful while a civil servant.

Dawne

I did, and found it very useful as a journalist. People didn't flip the papers on their desk white-side-up when I went in to interview them, and I could then ask questions about things I wasn't supposed to know about and leave them wondering how I found out about stuff that had never been discussed outside their office. Bwahahahaha

In fact, it was something I brought up in a law school discussion about what can you ethically say about your client to someone else. I made a point of telling them that there are a lot of people who can read upside down, so either turn the papers on your desk face-down when the journo comes in, or accidentally-on-purpose have the information you want them to know without being officially told sitting on top of the pile on the corner of the desk nearest their chair. :)

Heck, I can read upside-down and backwards, so if you want to pretend you're maintaining client confidentiality, write with some sort of marker that bleeds through the paper, and turn it face-down when I come in. I'll get the message.

I wish I could say the same. There were a lot of German literature assignments that got set aside when I got bored with all the excess verbiage, never to be picked up again.

Fortunately for my other major, DBF and I shared all of our classes, and had figured out we could save quite a bit of cash (and time) by buying only one set of books (average of 5 per class). Since I knew that I was responsible for teaching him what was contained in the half the books that I chose to read, I did force myself to finish those. And he was responsible for reading the other half the books and teaching me. Oddly enough, this method worked quite well for us. We each paid more attention to what we were reading, knowing that the other was 100% relying on the summary ... it wasn't just *my* grade going to suffer if I skimmed headings and skipped the text.

ROTFLMAO! It's even more useful in sales! I wish I had a quid for each time I've read my opposition's quotation figures upside-down on a school principal's desk! Very useful indeed...

IF you know how to do it. My tenant, who graduated with national honors in Political Science with minors in Sociology and Criminal Justice, who has a JD and passed the MA state bar on the first try, almost didn't pass the social studies teachers' test because multiple choice freaks her out. But I've talked to her enough to know that she's a good teacher, she cares about what she's doing, she puts in extra time, AND she teaches in a district that most people wouldn't drive through.

Multiple choice is a bad deal all around.

Elizabeth

The fact that the lawyer's misconduct in this instance couldn't be proven doesn't make the action ethical.

Elizabeth

Yes, a very useful skill to acquire especially when one of my bosses was prone to giving me an occasional "pep talk" for not being a "team person" and had his bullet points on a sheet of paper in front of him. Bruce

It depends heavily on the test. A well crafted multiple choice test can be absolutely challenging and devious for some kinds of skills. Some of the most challenging exams I ever had were MC exams in a multivariate statistics class. They were incredibly well crafted exams, and you had to know the material very intimately to do well on them. I will, however, give you that most MC exams are not particularly well crafted.

Best wishes, Ericka

Amen and amen. But there is no small part of me that is afraid that raising pay will encourage the wrong people to teach.

I didn't know the format of the test - essay, true/false, multiple choice, fill in the blank or some combination of those. Any of those can be easy to guess your way around.

First, I wonder why it freaks her out.

I had a long chat with the prof I worked for in college. I corrected the multiple choice and true/false section of his survey course tests. He also had 5-10 calculations, a "long answer" section (not quite essays, 2-4 sentence answers) and one essay question. (60-80 students for the entire year, tests were 90 minutes, term exams 3 hours)

His rationale for the multiple choice section was to weed out the cheaters or find the ones that weren't paying any attention to the course or the test. The choices were generally, the correct one, "a think about it and you know it's not it's not right" and one or two "you really haven't paying attention". If you passed the multiple choice, you generally passed the course. If you couldn't pass that part, you most likely were going to screw up the rest of the test. And he was generally right. Every so often some one's grade went up after the multiple choice section, but that was very rare.

I had a sociology professor that crafted some nasty ones

I actually applaud the teachers with large classes who craft great MC exams. Bravo to them for doing something that can be graded and returned quickly, yet still adequately assesses the students' mastery of the subject matter. Obviously, it's not an option for all classes, but where it is, I say go for it.

Best wishes, Ericka

Cheryl wrote

Multiple choice tests tend to freak me out. If you are a right brained intuitive thinker, like I am, there are a lot more greys in the world than black and white. I tend to do "one the one hand, on the other hand" to the extent that I should look like a statue of Shiva Nataraj. I can linear think; I taught logic. But faced with multiple choice, I see multiple possibilities, and trying to discern which one the test writer was going for takes me a lot of time. I could just try and "intuit" the answers, but know from bitter experience in highschool that I am sometimes seeing thinks from a different perspective from the teacher---and with multiple choice you have no chance to defend or explain your answer. Just don't like them. Never gave them to students--always gave short answer tests (but then again, never had more than 180 students in a class), so that there was that chance for someone to explain how they got there.

Dawne

Because lots of things freak her out. But there are skills to multiple choice that have nothing to do with knowledge of content.

As Ericka pointed out, there is such a thing as a well-constructed multiple choice test. As far as I can tell, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts doesn't know how to construct such a thing, including for the MCAS (k-12 comprehensive tests).

Elizabeth