[kenrexford]

So, my sixth grade daughter has a c right now in reading. As she is bright, I guessed that she is screwing around. But, to be fair, I decided to go online and see the tests that she takes on reading comprehension. Maybe I could help her?

I am an attorney, which involves a ton of reading comprehension. I scored well enough on the LSAT to get into Georgetown University Law. I was a national merit finalist and high school valedictorian.

I have no clue what the hell the answer was to any of the questions. In fact, I could not even reduce the four choices down to three.

[kenberg]

I have been hearing such things, mostly in the mathematics area, and while I don't want to jump on any bandwagon I am concerned. Right now, I know very little.

A very useful principle would be that a normal adult should be able to understand a sixth grade question even if that adult has not attended the sixth grade class. If this is not so, they are teaching jargon, not math, not reading.

I am more than willing to hold off on conclusions until I hear more, but I think that the above principle is a very good starting place.

My grandkids are doing fine as far as I know and I think that their parents are happy, but I hear some complaints from others.


Btw, I did not say parents need to be able to answer all sixth grade questions. I think I can still pretty much recite the Gettysberg Address but I expect there are some questions about, say, the French and Indian War that sixth graders can outscore me on.

[MickyB]

Let's see a question or two then, Ken!

[barmar]

Adults forget a lot of stuff that's taught in grade school. Remember the game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"

What does the thread title mean? Is that the name of the reading comprehension test? I tried googling it, didn't see much that looked related.

[mike777]

 kenrexford, on 2014-May-23, 14:15, said:

So, my sixth grade daughter has a c right now in reading. As she is bright, I guessed that she is screwing around. But, to be fair, I decided to go online and see the tests that she takes on reading comprehension. Maybe I could help her?

I am an attorney, which involves a ton of reading comprehension. I scored well enough on the LSAT to get into Georgetown University Law. I was a national merit finalist and high school valedictorian.

I have no clue what the hell the answer was to any of the questions. In fact, I could not even reduce the four choices down to three.

fwiw I agree with your first thought.


You may wish to chat with her reading teacher.

As an involved, very involved parent you of all people know what she reads at home and at what level.

To be fair at this point you seem more involved and concerned than most c level parents...ok more than 99% of parents.

[kenberg]

Procore appears to be a company implementing Core standards.

http://pro-core.us/

I could not find any sample questions from them.


I did see something in algebra from a different company (I have misplaced the link) that is addressing Core. I was surprised by how plain vanilla it was. It reminded me of wht I took in 1952 at a run of the mill public high school. You had to know what "terms" meant, and "coefficients", how to solve a quadratic equation, how to find the minimum (or maximum) of a quadratic expression (one variable of course), etc.

I continue to assert my ignorance of the strengths and weaknesses. of Core.

[Zelandakh]

The only questions I could find at Ken's link were:-

Which of the following does NOT occur when using a credit card instead of currency?

a. possible service fees
b. accrued interest on unpaid baalnce
c. increased spending limit if overspending occurs
d. less cash carried and an expedited checout process
--

If each picture of a sun represents 10 sunny days, how many sunny days were there this summer?
June (2 suns)
July (1 sun)
August (3 suns)

a. 6 sunny days
b. 20 sunny days
c. 3 sunny days
d. 60 sunny days
--

Which unit is used to meaure the size of an angle?

a. centimeters
b. degrees
c. Celsius
d. angle
--

Which type of angle measures more than 90^o, but less than 180^o?

a. acute
b. right
c. obtuse
d. straight
--

There are many different processes that shape the surface of the Earth. Mountains are built and lowered by different Earth processes.

Name an Earth process that results in building mountains then explain how this process builds mountains. (2 points)
Name an Earth process that results in mountain lowering then explain how this process lowers mountains. (2 points)
--

None of these struck me as being particularly difficult. Would be interested in seeing some of the questions Ken (Rexford) is referring to. Do you have a direct link to the questions Ken?

As an aside, in general the process of private exams is usually one that promotes easier questions. The reason is that schools want to obtain the highest grades possible for their students to appear higher on ranking tables and therefore tend to choose the easiest exam board. This happened at my school when they changed from Nuffield to AEB specifically for this reason and I saw it happen even more strongly in the years after the introduction of GCSEs (since this was an obvious time for schools to reassess their exam structure).

What I can understand would be a process where initial tests would be designed to be ridicuoously hard and final tests to be significantly easier. This would promote the idea that the provided course was improving the students and also provide encouragement for the students who see their grades improving. Is it possible that this is the real answer Ken?

[kenberg]

I started using credit cards when I was in my thirties so I am a little vague about question 1. I suppose the answer is b. For one thing "accrued interest on unpaid balance" is not an event. If for some reason interest does accrue when you use the card, it should be "accrual of interest on unpaid balance". We don't carry an unpaid balance from month to month, and no interst occurs, when I use it or otherwise.

On the other hand, c. is attractive. "spending limit" seems incompatible with raising the limit if you overspend, but in the commercial world words seldom mean what they appear to mean so a spending limit that goes up when you want to spend more does not seem impossible to me.
As for expedited check out, it depends. Buying a drink or two and leaving a few bucks on the bar as you leave is pretty expedited.

The main thing for young people to learn about credit cards is that they are the invention of the devil.

Anyway, these questions seem fine to me. I assume they have been told about credit cards. And tectonic shifts.

Zel speaks to a major problem with exams. Often the teachers have a larger interest in having the students do well, or appearing to do well, than the students do. Especially during my adolescence, say age 14-16, I was very casual about how I did. Of course you need to pass, but getting a youngster to much care about more is tough. The teacher's jobs may depend on how a kid does, and the kid doesn't care.

[Trinidad]

My kids use to come home regularly with their reading comprehension tests (questions and answers) from elementary school. I could draw a few conclusions:

My son answers the questions according to grammatical structures of the questions, rather than the information in the text (because - not unlike me - he is too lazy to look back into the text): If the question asks for a noun, and the choice options are three verbs and one noun, he picks the noun.

On top of that, when a question was grammatically phrased incorrectly (which is the case for a surprising amount of questions) my son used to simply not answer the question. We needed to explain to him that this intolerance for the shortcomings of others is not in his best interest.

Several times, he was asked for an opinion. This often is obviously not the same opinion as the opinion of the author of the test editor. (I remember a question in a text about the invention of ice cream a few centuries ago. One of the king's cooks who was supposed to keep the recipe secret (telling was punishable by death, which the cook was aware of) sold the recipe and was executed. To the question "What do you think about that?", my son picked the answer: "Fine. He knew that this would happen. He got what he deserved." which was obviously wrong.)

Then there was the text claiming that the reindeer is the largest deer in Europe... Fine for most kids in the Netherlands who have never seen a reindeer. But my kids were born in Sweden. And what do you answer when they ask the question: "Which deer is the largest in Europe?". Naturally, my daughter - who is even more stubborn than I am - wrote down "moose". But this was obviously wrong.

Fortunately, both my kids are pretty good at reading comprehension, so they can afford all this. But the amount of nonsense, logical and grammatical errors that I can find in these reading comprehension tests is astonishing to me. And the teachers don't care. They simply run their stuff on autopilot and don't want to be bothered.

Rik

[kenrexford]

I have no good way to link samples, because you need a password to log in. However, I can generally describe the process. In one example, there is a poorly written story about choosing to live a child free lifestyle. The article is poorly written because sentence structure is very confusing, requiring a reread in several instances. As I was reading along, I assumed that the sentence structure was complex and unusual intentionally, to essentially create a tough read.

The question then had four sentences from the text and asked which of the four lacked evidence or argument in support.

This called into question whether the support was evidentiary or argument, whether the evidence needed to be in the text or in the sentence itself, and whether a judgment of support strength was required. All four sentences seemed to have some textual support, though. None clearly had support. Thus, I couldn't check any off either list.

[kenberg]

Sometime in the 70s someone, probably in the state legislature, got it in his head that we faculty should help in keeping students off of drugs. We were sent something to sign that committed us to something. I don't regard myself as a trouble maker and I have never used illegal drugs in my life (well, except for alcohol before I was 21). But I read it, and then I read it again,and I decided it could mean practically anything or nothing. I said I just couldn't sign it. Apparently others had the same reaction, and it was resolved by having us sign something that acknowledged we had received it and read it.

Lawyers, like mathematicians, can sometimes be a pain so of course I don't know to what extent you are fussing here. However I have certainly seen documents, and sometimes in important situations, where I can not at all be confident of the intended meaning.

[Zelandakh]

 kenberg, on 2014-May-25, 07:07, said:

The main thing for young people to learn about credit cards is that they are the invention of the devil.

This is the point of the question in my view. The children are taught that overspending with a credit card has consequences and they cannot rely on the card company raising their credit limit if they get into debt. You can therefore tell this is the right answer even if you do not agree with the others.

Incidentally if I had a child that was marked down for saying that the moose (elk) was the largest deer in Europe I would be having a word with the teacher or headmaster. The school should not be teaching misinformation and most likely many of the students went away from that test convinced for life that they knew the answer to this piece of trivia. More than that, the question should come with the proviso "according to the text" to make it clear that this was not a case of general knowledge. Would American schools also use an atheist-leaning text and then ask the question "Does God exist?" There would surely be an outrage!

To Ken, any chance of copying the text and answers here? No disrespect to you but you have a logical process that is often different from the average person (you are the Viktor Korchnoi of BBF ). In my experience, most "difficult" questions of this type can be whittled down from a mix of logic and exam technique. Also, how old is your daughter? Questions for an 18 year old should be difficult! for a 13 year old not so much.

[kenberg]

Since Ken says that his daughter is in sixth grade, we should all hope that she is not 18.

I looked up stuff about moose, reindeer and such and I found that a reindeer is what we over here call a caribou. I didn't know that! Rudolph the red-nosed caribou... Too late to change the lyrics, I think.

[Zelandakh]

Sorry Ken I have no idea about American grades. In England 6th form is ages 16-18. And yes, reindeer is the proper English word for caribou.

[kenberg]

Kindergarten is 0 and it goes up 1 every year. Typically add 5 to the grade level to get age. I was 4 when I started Kindergarten (=0) but turned 5 in January. Kindergarten is now (a lot) tougher than it used to be so usually they don't take someone who is not 5 at the beginning of the school year.

[blackshoe]

When I graduated high school, some of my classmates were 17 (your "add 5") and some were 18, as I was. The 18 year olds were born in the spring of their birth year, the 17 year olds were in the fall (or something like that). I don't know if, or how much, that's changed in the last half-century or so.

[kenberg]

It has changed, here and elsewhere I think. I was thinking add 5 for the beginning of the year. I was 4 when I started K, 5 when I finished, and I was the second youngest in my class (birthday Jan 1, Sally something or other had her birthday on the 13th I think but her parents got her in. I have a grandchild who turns 5 this Sep 11th. He needs to be tested to see if he can start K this fall.

It's not hard to see the reason, and it fits in with my view of we do things.
1. People decide that kids need to be taught more stuffearlier, so they beef up kindergarten, including making it a full day (I went from 9 to 12)
2. People say omg, this is too tough for the 4 year olds, we had better insist that they be 5.
3. People say omg, we we have to get these 4 year olds started on learning
4. People start a pre-school program for 4 year olds, making it a gentle program for half a day..

The result, after we go through steps 1,2,3,4, is that 4 year olds go for a half day, 5 year olds go for a full day, just as when I started school in 1943.

[blackshoe]

I have long felt that kids can learn faster, or more, or both, than they do. I well remember some of my high school teachers inspired me to that - and some bored me to tears. My 11th grade English teacher was great, and I did very well - so well that she recommended me for the AP English course senior year. The guy who taught that course was, shall we say, less inspiring, and I didn't do nearly as well in his class. Another thing - languages. I took French in 2nd and 3rd grade, had a ball with it, and took it again in high school. I learned it well enough that even today I can get along in it, although I stumble a lot because I haven't used it much in the last forty years. I often regret not having taken more languages when I was young - although I'm not sure I would have been allowed to do that, given all the other courses on my plate. I was lucky in math and sciences, too, having some very good teachers in those fields. I guess my parents picked some good school districts.

[nigel_k]

When I was studying law, I had a discussion with a professor (about a question in a multi-choice test) that went something like this:

Him: You have given the logician's answer rather than the linguist's answer.
Me: So is the lawyer's answer usually the same as the linguist's answer?
Him: Unfortunately, yes, it is.

It sounds like Ken is having a similar experience.

[gwnn]

 nigel_k, on 2014-May-26, 03:22, said:

When I was studying law, I had a discussion with a professor about a question is a multi-choice test that went something like this:

Him: You have given the logician's answer rather than the linguist's answer.
Me: So is the lawyer's answer usually the same as the linguist's answer?
Him: Unfortunately, yes, it is.

It sounds like Ken is having a similar experience.

Linguists* describe how people use language in their day-to-day lives, logicians describe how people ought to think and speak in an ideal world that is nowhere to be found in our galaxy. Why is it unfortunate that lawyers (who work with real people in real life, not robots from outer space) use language as other people do? I agree, though, that sloppy wording is in no one's best interest.

*-descriptive linguists, at any rate.

This reminds me of a math problem we had in high school, something like "We cut a 5x5x5 cube in cubes that have whole numbers as their edge length. What is the minimum number of cubes that we can obtain?" And there was an obnoxious guy somewhere in the front who said, thinking he's very clever, "one!! we cut the cube in one!" and would not sway when we repeated the first two words of the problem many times: we cut the cube. If you leave something intact, it means you do not cut it, and if you cut something, it means you do not not cut it.

This post has been edited by gwnn: 2014-May-26, 03:38