Teaching to the Test and Beyond

by Carol Brown Dodson

Walk into any tenth grade language arts classroom a few weeks before the Ohio Graduation Test and you'll see evidence that the test will be given soon. Administrators may have mandated that teachers stop all activities other than preparing students for the test. Teachers follow the mandate and work to prepare their students for the test, often by providing short reading passages, followed by questions about the passages. Some teachers rely on state practice tests, while others use questions from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or released items from past OGT administrations. Still others use packaged programs that promise success on the OGT.

Other instruction has stopped. Lesson plans are put aside. Reading strategies are ignored. No novels or other literary works are assigned. Textbooks are left in lockers or backpacks. The classroom focus is on the big test.

As the teacher, you might question the practice, but you're also afraid not to do what you've been told to do. What if you ignore the test prep and continue teaching as you normally would? If your students perform poorly, you are likely to be blamed because you didn't follow the instructions.

Yet we hear from various researchers and experts in the field that this is not the way to prepare students. In their book Test Talk, Amy H. Greene and Glennon Doyle Melton (2007) tell us, "In order to be effective test takers, students must first be effective readers. Many test-prep programs ask teachers to stop authentic, meaningful instruction to teach gimmicks and mnemonic devices related only to test-taking strategies. . . . In order to simplify test taking for students, we need to relate it to their other reading throughout the year by teaching them that a test is simply a genre to which general and specific reading strategies must be applied."

Greene and Melton analyze test items and passages by determining the reading strategies needed to answer the question correctly. They give an example of a short poem followed by a multiple-choice question which asks students what the poem is mainly about. It's not a simple main-idea question because students have to infer the main idea. The authors also determine that the question evaluates students' knowledge of several general reading strategies, including inferring, visualizing, activating schema, rereading, and using authors' clues.

Greene and Melton work in a school where students are generally successful in the school's program, but their test performance on high-stakes tests is poor. The two writers carefully studied the tests and questioned the difficulties for their students. They discovered that the reading test was hard, "not because of the content being tested, but because of the language and format the test writers used." Test questions relied on different structures for asking about things such as finding the main idea. The authors concluded that they didn't have to change the way they taught main idea. They had to ask students to recognize and answer main-idea questions on the test.

The writers decided that tests need to be taught as another genre, suggesting that some "genre-specific" strategies must be taught. Depending on the passage, these strategies might include understanding poetry conventions, navigating test format, following and understanding written directions, eliminating wrong answers, and translating "test talk."

As I continued to read Test Talk, I was reminded of a school that I worked with several years ago. The school was a wonderful place to visit. Students were engaged and excited about learning, teachers worked well beyond the normal school day, and the culture of the school was vibrant with questioning and seeking answers. Yet the school was in danger of losing the program and some of the teachers because their students performed poorly on district and state tests. Parents fought to keep the school's program and teachers, and teachers were not willing to do what they believed would compromise the reading workshop approach and quell the students' enthusiasm. The school ultimately was forced to make the change to a traditional program and curriculum. The successful program might have been continued if test talk had been taught as another genre.

In Naked Reading, Teri Lesesne (2006) underscores the need to teach students to read different types of text differently by using one of ten myths about reading to make her point. After presenting myth 8: "Reading is the same no matter what we are reading or why," Lesesne goes on to say that the myth is "So WRONG it is almost laughable. Content-area reading requires specialized content skills. Reading a poem demands a different set of skills from reading directions on programming your cell phone."

And based on the information in Test Talk (Greene & Melton, 2007), taking a test requires a still different set of skills. It's important to remember, though, that test-taking talk is only one type of reading, and it is one that will rarely if ever be used after completing school. Kelly Gallagher in Readicide (2009) stresses that challenging novels and valuable texts should not be replaced by test-preparation strategies and skills. Gallagher reminds us that students' brains need to be stretched by longer, challenging works.

Judith Langer directed a five-year study at the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA). A part of the study focused on test preparation. One finding of the study was that "In effective schools, test preparation does not mean mere practice of test-related items. Rather, the focus is on the underlying knowledge and skills needed to do well in coursework and in life, as well as on the tests, and these become part of the ongoing English language arts learning goals and the students' ongoing received curriculum. In contrast, in the typical schools, test prep means test practice. It is allocated its own space in class time, often before testing begins apart from the rest of the year's work and goals" (Langer, 2002).

Teachers and administrators will find this column and the research included here to be useful as a basis for discussion of test-preparation practices. The ORC resources described below will help in both teaching beyond the test and having discussions about best practices.

ORC Resources

AdLIT Reading Strategies (ORC #11634)
These strategies were prepared by Ohio educators for the ORC AdLIT website. The strategies are invaluable when working with struggling readers to help them reach the reading academic content standards and to show their growth in reading when they take the Ohio Graduation Test for Reading. Experienced Ohio educators highlight key reading strategies used by proficient readers and offer suggestions for teaching these strategies throughout the reading process and across the curriculum. This professional resource includes the specifics for teaching ten key reading strategies: (1) setting a purpose, (2) synthesizing, (3) questioning, (4) making inferences, (5) determining importance, (6) visualizing, (7) connecting to prior knowledge, (8) comparing/contrasting, (9) predicting, and (10) self-monitoring.

Each strategy is thoroughly explained, including a detailed definition of the reading strategy, where the strategy is discussed in the Ohio Academic Content Standards, how the strategy supports reading comprehension, what before, during, and after activities support students in using this strategy, how the strategy can be used to teach vocabulary, and where readers can go for additional resources pertaining to the strategy. This is a remarkable resource, in both its breadth and scope, for Ohio middle and high school teachers.

Reading Strategies: Scaffolding Students' Interactions with Texts (ORC #9478)
This resource provides an extensive list of specific reading strategies which can be used by students to promote their comprehension and understanding. The reading strategies themselves—RAFT, reciprocal teaching, QAR, think-aloud, and writer's craft seminar, to name but a few—are set up in columns that show their relationship to before, during, and after reading. A description and examples for each strategy contribute to the ease with which teachers can skim through the list and find perfect ways to implement the strategies with a class.

Model Reading Strategies to Improve Comprehension for All Students (ORC Resource #10171)
Laura Robb's "Model Reading Strategies to Improve Comprehension for All Students" is the featured article in the April 2007 issue of In Perspective. Robb, a literacy coach for teachers, echoes the concern of many of the teachers with whom she works: "But I'm not a reading teacher. I teach literature." From here, Robb discusses several teaching and reading strategies that she finds work well across all content areas. She includes a brief discussion about and specific ideas for classroom lessons under two categories: "The Read-Aloud: A Multipurpose Teaching Strategy" and "Paint Mental Images Using Your Senses—Before-, During-, and After-Reading Strategies." Robb's closing thoughts sum up what research and best practice both point to—that "when you show with think-alouds how a strategy works, students can step inside your head and better understand how visualizing (or another strategy) supports reading."

Using Email to Engage Students in the Reading Process—It Works! (ORC #10276)
Ohio teacher Carolyn Suttles (Bristol High School) shares her positive experience with teaching an easy-to-use reading strategy that works. Teachers will identify with Suttles's vignette and will find useful the ideas she stumbled upon while having her students use email to share their thoughts and reflections about their reading. The author points out the success of the reading strategy as twofold: (1) students "can't simply summarize what they read because the assignment generates points of discussion" and (2) "writing to a single student is much less threatening than voicing an opinion in front of 25."

Name That Chapter! Discussing Summary and Interpretation Using Chapter Titles (ORC #3371)
In this lesson, students name chapters in novels that they are reading, creating a cumulative list for the novel as they work through the text. Sample titles are discussed and debated before the class settles on a choice. In this process, students apply many reading comprehension strategies, including summarization, interpretation, making inferences, and drawing conclusions. This lesson provides opportunities for students to engage in meaningful classroom discourse and to reinforce their use of comprehension strategies.

Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel's Night (ORC #5934)
Working in small groups, students use reciprocal teaching strategies as they read and discuss Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. Everyone in the classroom takes a turn assuming the "teacher" role, as the class works with four comprehension strategies: predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying. When the memoir reading is completed, each group composes questions and leads the class in a discussion that focuses on themes, events, and symbols for an assigned section of the book. Excellent web resources are included to enhance this lesson.

References

Gallagher, Kelly. (2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about it. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Greene, Amy H., & Melton, Glennon Doyle. (2007). Test talk: Integrating test preparation into reading workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Langer, Judith. (2002). Effective literacy instruction: Building successful reading and writing programs. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Lesesne, Teri S. (2006). Naked reading: Uncovering what tweens need to become lifelong readers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Carol Brown Dodson is the outreach specialist for the Ohio Resource Center. Dodson was an English language arts consultant for the Ohio Department of Education and is past president of OCTELA (Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts). Dodson, formerly a high school English teacher, department chair, and supervisor of English language arts in Columbus Public Schools, serves on the Ohio Graduation Test Reading Content Committee.

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