Student Achievement Increases After Teachers Eliminate the “Five W’s”
Welcome back! Last week, we discussed how teachers can adopt two key classroom behaviors to improve how their students use academic adjectives in sentences. New testing designs require that students be able to accurately describe and compare ideas, concepts and people. Adjectives are the key to that skill.
This week, we are going to learn why most teacher questioning during classroom instruction is not that helpful for preparing students for testing. Here is why:
Here’s an example of the change.
Ten years ago, the test question sounded like this:
Today’s assessments require students to do something completely different.
Here is the difference. A great many test questions use a command word (imperative) like the following examples.
define, discuss, analyze, compare, synthesize, evaluate, formulate, construct
Tests make far less use today of questions that begin with words like:
who, what, when, where, why, how
This shows again what should be the big aha for educators as they design classroom instruction that effectively prepares students for test success.
