Biased Testing
Wow, so I love how no matter what I do, I still can't find time to make these posts. I hate these postings...I just wrote a whole big long post about biased testing and somehow it didn't work. Ok so here is my post all over again. At my school on Thursday, Mrs. Cooley brought in the writing prompt for the practice writing test on Friday. The prompt was: Write about your favorite vacation spot. I thought the prompt seemed pretty easy and normal but then Mrs. Cooley brought to my attention the fact that some students don't have a favorite vacation spot because they can't afford to take a vacation. I asked Mrs. Cooley if those students could write about a place that they would like to go and she said that it can be tricky. She recalled a student from a previous year when the writing prompt was similar and the student (being creative)wrote about a vacation to the moon. It was very descriptive and well written but they scored it a zero or non-scorable because he had never been to the moon. It almost seems like we are setting the children up to fail. It was certainly eye opening for me, and something I will keep in mind when I am creating tests.