The PIA. I standards based assessment that should measure how a class is progressing. My teacher and I have been analyzing the data for our results which we not great. Interestingly, we believe that most of the students have a better understanding than the low scores they received. After discussing with them about how/why this happened, they said they found the test confusing. The questions were not clear and the passages were too long. In terms of writing, almost no students did the constructed response correctly because they used different language than we were teaching.
My teacher decided that our class needs to learn techniques to respond to questions based on a passage-- so we are teaching them the UNRAAVEL technique. We are not only teaching them the specific information on the test, we are teaching them how to take a test. I don't know how I feel about actually going through short passages when we should be learning material, but it might help my students tackle difficult or tricky questions.
The parts of UNRAAVEL are: Underline the title, Now predict the passage, Run through and number paragraphs, Are you reading the questions?, Are the important words circled?, Venture (read) through the passage, Eliminate andy obviously wrong answers, Let the questions be answered.
While I certainly think test taking skills need to be addressed, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable teaching directly to the test. Don't get me wrong I have done so and will continue to because testing is so heavily weighted by both the district and various administrations. I'm curious though, what grade level is the because UNRAAVEL is quite long.How are students conditioned to remember it all?
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