Sunday, December 2, 2007

Narrowing Our Focus on Achievement Test Prep

I was looking for achievement practice test items and came across another valuable document created by another Cleveland school. Cleveland University Heights schools has done an item analysis by standard and benchmark of the OAT since it has been administered. Of course, the state isn’t releasing the entire test anymore but the document is still extremely valuable.

Basically it boils down to this….there are lots of indicators but not all are tested. To best prepare our students for the tests we might try to teach all of the indicators but we would be wise to really make sure that students are proficient with the ones that the state consistently tests each year. For example, on the Grade 3 test the state has always asked a fair amount of comprehension questions (literal, inferential, evaluative), central ideas on Informational Text, and Main Idea, Characters, Setting for Literary Text. On the other hand they have never asked a question on High Frequency Site words.

In 4th grade Reading the emphasis is on Summarizing for both Reading Process and Reading Applications while the state hasn’t asked a single question on the Characteristics of Genre. Good information to have if you ask me.

http://resources.chuh.org/curriculum/gradelevel.lasso

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Guess we need to change some of the questions on our weekly tests! What a useful resource!