8th of February - question test

Oooohhh.... Those questions...

I prepared a test for the class that was similar to the last one they took. It looked like that:
Question Test #2

While I gave them lots of credit last time I corrected the tests really strictly this time and just put the achieved points into the "lehrer office" and gave them exactly the grades that they were given. The average was 4.83 and that's a whole lot better than last time. In my reflection about the last question test I wrote that the average would have been below 4 last time so about a grade less than this time.

But what really, really hit me was how half of the class did with exercise 7-18.
Many of those kids, even the best ones in class did not realise that this was about deciding if the had to use the auxiliary verb or the "to do". So they started with "Is it sunny...", "Are they happy?", "Go you to school today?" and so on. So many of them had only 10 out of those 24 points because 5 of those 12 sentences are with auxiliary verbs. But then with the next exercise, they used the "to do" and the auxiliary verb perfectly... Why is that?



While I was correcting those tests, one boy came to the room and asked me how he did. So I asked him what the question was for "you go to school today" and without having to think he said "Do you go to school today?". Well they know this??? Why did all run into the same trap in this exercise??? Was it because I started with two sentences that had an auxiliary verb? Where they so into just swapping verb and subject that they just went on? Well I can see some of those kids bumping their heads on the desk when they get back their tests and I feel sooo sorry! That's 14 points that many of them just threw away. And those 14 points meant 1.25 grades.

But still, here are the grades:
3x 5.75 / 3x 5.5 / 1x 4.5 / 4x 4.25 / 2x 3.75 which is an average of 4.83

If almost half the class had not fallen for that exercise, the average would have been 5.4 which would have been a great success compared to the 3.85 from the first test. Maybe I should have written as a title that they should choose between the auxiliary verb and the "to do" but since we have done this exercise a thousand times I thought that was clear.

This makes me think of something I read by Vera F. Birkenbihl. I'm sitting in a cafe at the moment so I don't have those documents here with me but I'll just write what I still remember:

Birkenbihl describes our brains like knowledge networks. For some topics we have lots of knowledge strings and for some topics we have very little. The more we know about a topic, the easier it is to knit new knowledge strings into the network (so the easier it is to learn). Now while those networks are quiet big in adult's brains in children's brains there are many little knowledge network islands that are not liked together yet. Some American doctor found out that this is the reason why children have difficulties to show what they can during test situations because they cannot just "jump" from one island to the next. Especially not when they are under pressure. Just by the age of 10-13 kids kind of knit their little islands together in order to get a big mainland.
Birkenbihl makes a impressive example but I don't know how much sense it makes in English ;-) Well if a child had the topic "beer brewing" in class and heard the word "Blume" (= Flower, that's how we call the white foam on a beer in German). Now there is a test and the same kid had to answer something about this flower than it might be that its thoughts jump on the "garden flower island" instead of the "beer flower island" and there it will get stuck. Especially when stress rises. So the older the child the more likely it will be able to leave this island but very young children will be stuck on that island for the rest of the test and won't be able to answer any questions on the topic of beer no matter how well they had prepared. That's just the way our brains work. Only when they walk back home, and the stress finally falls off them they will remember the question and the answer they had not been able to give and they will feel extremely stupid.

So could it be that with those first two statements being with auxiliary verbs I led some of those kids onto the "swapping island" and they couldn't leave it? Well that's definitely worth thinking about and it will be worth thinking about how to avoid that. But grades are made. Report cards are printed and this test did not affect the final great of those kids so there will be some moaning in class but there will be no harm for anyone.