Item of the Week
Monday, January 17th, 2011In this somewhat new blog feature, I will offer up a question from the statewide examinations that New York City students take each year. The purpose of this will not be for you to try to provide the correct answer, but rather to join me in examining the question. What does it tell us about student understanding? What do each of the wrong answers mean? What is this question testing? What is it really testing? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?
I gave a workshop for data teams on Friday. Three of the groups were examining last year’s 4th grade ELA scores, which I knew meant that we’d be talking about Abigail. In my visits to schools, I’ve found that students who took this exam had a lot of trouble on questions relating to this poem (click to enlarge):
Students had trouble on a number of the questions, but we will just look at one: Item 21 on the 2010 New York State Grade 4 ELA Exam:
The intended performance indicator is “Make predictions, draw conclusions, and make inferences about events and characters,” but we can be the judge of that.
What is this question testing? Does it fit the performance indicator? Which of the wrong answers would you predict students would choose the most often? Why? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?