FWIW my mom was a teacher and I distinctly remember her teaching me that it was all a game that needed to be played (for me it actually helped my attitude towards the whole thing oddly enough but of course YMMV). She flat out taught her elementary aged students strategies for multiple choice tests and this was 30 years ago. She viewed multiple choice test taking as a skill like reading and writing. Sure it isn't a really a useful skill in most of the real world but for 12+ years it is a very necessary one for most people to get to where they eventually want to be in life so you might as well learn to do it to the best of your abilities.
Yes... although if others may recall, my DD was tearing her hair out over this sort of thing even 5-6y back, when this type of "assessment" started becoming common in the rollout to the CC language arts.
She eventually learned to just "play the game" as noted in the quote above... but it NEVER really ceased to burn her britches, for lack of a better term.
One particular gem in a high school course that I
still recall, because it-- and the result-- frustrated her nearly to tears...
T/F-- Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein for Lord Byron.
This is a PERFECT example of "the more you know, the harder it gets to guess what the item designer/writer actually INTENDED with the query."
DD ranted to me about the Shelleys, Byron, the year-without-a-summer, the complex relationship between Mary and Byron, Lake Geneva, and social mores of the time-- for nearly twenty minutes, as I recall... but then she still had no clue what the "right" answer was for that question.
It's been my explanation to DD that her job, with such things in this world, is to be Jane Goodall of the Neurotypicals, as it were. That is, she has to attempt to understand what was BEHIND the assessment item in order to answer them in the expected way.
I did complain to her school about this as a very subtle but
extremely pervasive structural problem in educational materials which are intended for non-gifted or MG children, and which are paradoxically toxic for those who are HG+ since their lived experiences and thinking don't PERMIT them to take a fully NT perspective.
It's much like the well-documented structural problems related to standardized testing in minority and disadvantaged populations. You can't ask questions about sailing and golf of children who face daily food and housing insecurity and have spent their entire lives in poor urban settings.
One can't really take a perspective that one has no experience with, if that makes sense.
Well-- for HG+ children, their
entire schooling/assessment experience is one of these challenges after another. The thing to remember is that the only way through that is to view it as a
social game; my DD started to do very well once she took that approach. She was able to leverage her social savvy and understanding of NT behavior/thinking/motivation to kind of focus in on what such things probably INTENDED to be asking.
This is one of those weird things that most parents and educators interpret as being a thing that only needs to be done with children on the spectrum, or those with some kind of social dysfunction/delay. Uhhhh-- yeah, I'm thinking not. DD is and has always been able to do this with a great deal of finesse, even with people far removed from her own experiences. It's just that she hadn't considered that PEOPLE write these assessment items.
Asynchrony at work, that.
Once she got that bit of it, it got much easier. This is probably something that
cannot work for non-NT children who aren't HG/HG+, but for many of the kids in this community, it's worth a shot.
