MichellePaquinJournal3

Michelle Paquin EDC 452 3-1-09 Assessment Journal #3

I have recently observed these third-graders taking a multiple-choice test on spelling and comprehension from one of their stories. This story was from their __Reading Street__ basal reader called //Picking Up the Sky//. These were individual based tests in class that the class completed after reading this story together. The test was divided into two parts, one for spelling and the other for comprehension. In the first section, students were to read the sentence, and choose the meaning that fits the underlined word best. The second section was for the reading comprehension. The directions for this part were to read each question and mark your answers. These questions were based on if the student fully comprehended the story. Overall, the results of this test were fairly good. Most students did well on both parts. There were a few questions that students answered incorrectly, but the class did well for the most part. This was probably because the story had been read aloud as a class and the teacher was able to clarify most of the important parts of the story. This type of test came straight from the __Reading Street__ book. Therefore, it did correspond with the story very well. The questions and vocabulary that the students were supposed to learn and understand were definitely addressed and the students were assessed on it. However, since it was a multiple-choice test, the validity of the students’ knowledge was not accurately tested. In any multiple-choice test, if students do not know the answer, they can just guess. I am not saying that every student did not pay attention to the story and did not learn what needed to be learned and guessed on the test. Instead, I am just implying that the amount that the students learned could have been tested in another way. Perhaps, the teacher could have used some questions from this test, and added some short answer questions to test their comprehension. Vocabulary could have been tested as either a multiple-choice question, or students would need to use each vocabulary term in a sentence, relevant to the story. This way, the chance of students just guessing an answer would be reduced.

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