Moving from Test Question to High-Level Task
NSI session from February 10, 2022
Change Package: Moving from Test Question to High-Level Task
Impact on Teaching
Teachers at all grade levels are often tasked with engaging their students in series of multiple choice questions as a way to prepared students to take standardized tests. However, this type of work often leaves little room for sense-making and conversation, critical routines for instruction. Multiple-choice tasks also tend to skip over comprehension, a critical step in any reading sequence. The work of moving a multiple-choice task to a high-level task invites teachers to breakdown a multiple-choice question into a sequence of work that sets students up for success by inviting students to make use writing and talk to make sense of the text through open-ended questions. Once students have done the heavy lifting with the open-ended questions, students can then be asked to respond to the multiple-choice question and provide reasoning for their selection as a demonstration of learning.
Impact on Students
When we focus instruction on test preparation that strictly looks like the test, students begin to see, as Davis and Vehabovic (2017) say, "test performance as the most important feature of their literacy identity." By keeping the focus of instruction on high-level, sequenced tasks, students are more likely to see themselves as readers and writers, and creators of content, as opposed to seeing literacy as a means of getting a good test score.
How To
Planning
The goal for this work is to help students to create a mental model of the work they need to go through to respond to the multiple-choice question. When their reading and writing mucles are built through heavy-lifting and then directly applied to the types of questions they'll see on the state test, working with multiple-choice questions will feel much less complicated.
Start by reviewing the multiple choice question you've been asked to work with. For example, your question might be about the theme of the story. This might be the question:
The story explores the theme of a son -
a. disappointing his father
b. imitating his father
c. trying to impress his father
d. making peace with his father
Next, breakdown the prompt into its parts. You might start by asking yourself, "So, what do I have to understand as a reader to respond?" Using the above prompt as an example, there are three things that are helpful to know to respond to this prompt
1. I have to be able to put into my own words what the story is about.
2. I have to have an understanding about the characters, and
3. I have to be able to state the theme of the story.
Next, decide on the instructional tasks that can lead up to students being able to respond to that MC question successfully. In looking at how I’ve broken down the sample prompt, I see that I can probably ask students to do the work on “What’s the story about?” and “What do I know about the characters?” together because students are going to naturally want to talk about what they know about the characters as they talk about what the story’s about and vice versa. So these two pieces become my comprehension task because they hit at the basic understanding of the story and I'll create a sequence of work for that. You can find more info about comprehension tasks here.
After comprehension, I'll want to create a sequence of work that takes students into writing and talking about the story's theme, which is still very much a comprehension piece but takes students deeper into synthesizing the text, and is really the heart of the question that students need to respond to for our multiple-choice question.
Finally, you'll want to invite students to complete a metacognitive step back prior to responding to the multiple-choice demonstration of learning. This piece becomes important because it helps make the process students went through visible for themselves, but it also lets other students see that there are multiple ways to arrive at a response and gives kids other processes to draw upon when they might be stuck.