Avoid “trick” questions. 

The purpose of testing should be to determine what our students know and are able to do.  Questions that are intentionally misleading, or “distractors” in multiple choice tests, can serve to distinguish between more and less subtle understandings.  Unfortunately, however, there is a cost. Such questions often feel manipulative, even mean-spirited to students. Besides, the distinctions sought by such questions are often based on the notion that the test is there to sort students into those who are more or less successful.  If student mastery of the essential learning goals is indeed our highest priority, such sorting is unnecessary and counterproductive.

Don’t penalize domino mistakes. 

If a skills-based problem has several steps, later stages often depend on getting the initial steps correct.  Early mistakes cascade into mistakes throughout the problem and lead to a wrong answer, as seen in the problem below.  Each step should be evaluated on its own correctness, given the results of the previous steps. A mistake at the beginning of the problem (marked with an “X”) carries through the problem, as indicated by the arrows dropping down.  Given the results of this first mistake, the remaining steps in the problem are all correct (marked with large “C’s”).

Grading in this way takes more effort, but it helps draw attention to the subskill the student needs to focus on.  It also reminds the student that he has done much or most of the problem correctly, as opposed to merely getting the correct answer.

The role of conversational learning in formative assessments. 

As described in “Study Groups”, one of the most important areas in which students can help each other learn is in going over tests.  While it takes enormous trust (which must be cultivated), once a student can reveal his mistakes and misunderstandings to a group, the conversation that follows can be some of the most effective learning he will do.  It is a prime opportunity to identify and explore what he hasn’t learned yet and to dive into the details of his misunderstandings. It is an effective beginning to the remediation he must do.

Above and beyond: to test or not to test. 

If you practice differentiated learning in your classroom, while some students are focussing on remediation, others will be working on enrichment activities.  Should those activities be assessed? In general, the answer is no.

No one should ever be penalized for having the initiative to volunteer to take on more challenging work.  If a student does badly on an assessment of the enrichment work he did, he will be disinclined to volunteer to do it again.

There are, however, circumstances where assessing above and beyond work may make sense.  It may be useful for a student to receive ungraded feedback on an assessment of enrichment work to help him see how well he understands it.  This is particularly relevant if that work is related to a long-term goal such as preparing for an AP exam. (See below).

Another circumstance when this practice may be valuable is if you are teaching a “de-tracked” class that includes both regular and honors level curriculum.  It may be that the above and beyond work is expected of students enrolled at the honors level, and their grades should incorporate an assessment of that work.

Diagnosing poor test results. 

If your students are self-evaluating their work, a teachable moment in directing a student towards realistic self-assessment may arise if his results on tests are much poorer than his reported results on doing the same material in his homework.  This discrepancy may occur for a number of reasons. The student may have knowingly claimed to understand the material better than he actually did because he didn’t want to do any additional work. This problem tends to be self-correcting, but warrants a conversation between you and the student.  

Another possibility is that he suffers from test anxiety and can’t reproduce his success with the homework under the pressure of a test.  Working to alleviate test anxiety can be helpful, as described below. It might also be possible to find an alternative form of assessment that the student won’t find so frightening.

A third possibility is that the student simply isn’t metacognitive enough to know he hasn’t mastered the skill yet.  A typical example is when he uses the helpful hints but doesn’t recognize that he can’t do the work independently yet.  This is a problem of self-awareness and requires practice on his part to pay better attention to his habit of glossing over problems.

Alleviating test anxiety. 

Many students find tests stressful, and some experience mild panic attacks on a regular basis.  If we want to make our assessments accurate, as well as avoid causing our students such distress, we have to directly attack the problem of test anxiety.

We can begin by explicitly changing the meaning of tests.  Once students understand that tests are not a way to accumulate points, but rather a check-up on their progress in learning the material, the pressure to do well is often reduced.  Students understand that making mistakes is not a permanent failure; they can recover from a low score without penalty or shame.

It is also important to teach students to break the trance that many of them go into while taking a test.  Teaching them to take a break every now and then, breathe deeply and extract their minds from the test can give them more clarity.  Breathing well is particularly important in reducing panicky feelings; it increases oxygen flow to the brain and allows students to think more clearly.

Lightening the mood during testing is also a good strategy. Reminding them that this is only a test, and that when they are 40 years old, looking back on their lives, this moment will have receded into complete insignificance, helps them get some perspective.  I would often interrupt them when they least expected it and tell them a bad joke to get them to groan and laugh.

Allowing enough time for the slowest students to finish successfully can help alleviate a particular source of pressure.  This raises the question of what students who finish more quickly should do once they are done with the test. In my experience, there should be a number of non-distracting activities available, including reading, internet research, writing about current events (described in detail in “Tools for Teachers”), or working on long-term projects.

It is often worthwhile to hold a test-taking workshop for students who are particularly troubled by test anxiety.  You can identify those common areas that a student may feel panicky about. He may worry about how much time he is taking to answer questions and get paralyzed because he is afraid he won’t be able finish all the problems. He may get stuck staring at a hard question and not get past it, rather than leaving it behind and working on easier questions that he can do relatively quickly. He may need a different setting, sitting in a different place or listening to music.  He may need you to stop by periodically and get him refocussed, so that he feels supported. The trick is to help him isolate his difficulty with tests and to identify and put coping strategies into place.

Finally, when a student says “I’m just a bad test taker”, he is telling you that he has a fatalistic, fixed mindset and doesn’t believe that there is anything that he can do about it.  Working with him to identify where the problem lies can help him not only to do better on tests, but also to become less fatalistic and more optimistic in his attitude. In other words, challenging a student’s test anxieties can serve as a means of shifting him from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Remediation should be voluntary whenever possible. 

If a student chooses to learn from his mistakes on a test, it is much more likely that it will be meaningful for him than if remediation is mandatory.  As always, we are trying to have students both master the content and grow as people as much as possible. Becoming self-directed and feeling a sense of ownership over the learning process are important aspects of that growth.  It is paramount for the teacher to encourage responsible, internally motivated choices.

On the other hand, there may be students who, for various reasons, choose not to learn from their mistakes.  In particular, a student with a fixed mindset may feel hopeless about the prospect of improving his understanding through personal effort.  He may simply not believe that the extra work will improve his performance. For such a student, it is best for the teacher to intervene. Making remediation mandatory for him, preferably with a lot of support, will not only improve his mastery of the content, but will also help him break the fatalistic hopelessness he feels about school. The key here is to not offer too much choice.  If you plan open work time within a unit, create an in-class remediation workshop for every student who scored below a given threshold on a test. Even simpler, have study groups review the tests together, going over every question that every student in the group got wrong. In this way, even a resistant student will be forced to begin the process of learning from his mistakes.

You may also want an upper threshold on who can do remediation.  If a student gets an “A-“ on a test and wants to keep working on the material, he is probably not doing remediation for the sake of learning from his mistakes.  Rather, opening the process up to him is most likely reinforcing the bad habits of doing school — he is going to squeeze a few more points out of the system. Of course, this is not always the case, and whether you have an upper threshold for remediation will depend on what you perceive your students’ motivations to be.

Remediation and student maturity. 

As always, the amount of freedom offered to a student must be attuned to his readiness to act responsibly.  Younger, less mature students should have the remediation process spelled out explicitly, with little leeway in how it is accomplished.  For older, more responsible students, remediation can be more varied and responsive to their individual needs. As the year progresses and students become accustomed to the increased level of responsibility and freedom to steer their own learning, more and more choice can be made available to them.

Differentiated remediation. 

Unit contracts offer the flexibility of allowing students who need remediation to continue working on the previous unit while the class moves on to the next unit.  A student’s ability to work on past and present topics simultaneously requires learning how to manage his time well. Many students will initially need support in learning this skill.

Remediation and effort. 

The purpose of remediation is for students to learn from their mistakes.  This process can be complicated and may take a great deal of time. On the other hand, when the remediation process requires too much time and effort, even highly motivated students will not do it.  A balance must be struck between having the process be rigorous enough to be meaningful and straightforward enough to be worth the effort in the student’s eyes.

In order to maintain forward momentum and cohesion in a class, remediation needs to have a well-defined time limit.  In my experience, completing all review work within a week of the test is a reasonable amount of time.

Remediation and grades. 

How to evaluate remediation efforts is a subjective call.  Taking the higher of the two test grades — the original test and the results after remediation — may cause students to not take the first test as seriously, particularly if the classroom culture isn’t well established.  On the other hand, the grit required to pursue learning after having made mistakes is an important attribute that should be legitimately rewarded.

In my practice, I found that taking the average of the two scores — allowing a student to get “halfway to perfect” — was a reasonable compromise.  I also decided that if a student’s test score went down after remediation, I would keep the original test score so as not to discourage students from learning from their mistakes.  They should never be punished for showing tenacity.