Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Multiple choice reading quizzes

I COMPLETELY hear what you're saying, Questions. Unfortunately, with things going as they are, your child's problem is not going away at all. We're looking at it almost every day in SIXTH grade in a "gifted" curriculum. My child has read ONE book this year in LA, while spending countless hours on these multiple-choice "gotcha" questions. They have also done grammar review, which is okay for what it is, except that she personally has flawless grammar (aced the pretest--most students did quite poorly) and does not need any instruction in it.

I am not some anti-CC raver, but the LA aspect is really concerning to me and has even caused me to consider private school. I'm ready to rise up in angry revolution.

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...





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.

ditto chay & HK.

My mother and chay's mother were apparently on the same wavelength. She told us a few decades ago that the task of successful mc standardized testing was ... figuring out how the exam-writer thinks. In fact, that was pretty much her approach to any test-taking. It was sufficiently ingrained in me that one of the first things I did on taking a GRE subject exam many years ago was to glance at the names of the test contributors. I actually recognized one of them as a past professor, and remember thinking, score! I know how he writes tests.

My K student is getting letter grades... but I do agree with you.

I live in a different country. Grades may happen at middle school or maybe not to high school. It is good mostly but it can lead to parents thinking all is fine until it obviously isn't. Multi choice isn't that common either.

If multi choice is going to be ongoing I agree with lessons in testing. With multi choice knowing how to do it is as important as knowing the subject. Sad but there it is.

Oh, I feel for her. I'm still angry about the question I had on a health test (taught by a PE teacher) in HS.

T/F -- Bacteria cause disease.

I was horribly shy but biology was my thing and getting this wrong bugged me enough that I went to the teacher to argue my case. The teacher just gave me a blank look and wouldn't give me the point.

Unfortunately this issue of trying to guess what the test writer is thinking and knowing too much never goes away. I recently took a professional recertification exam and the question with which I struggled the most was about something in my area of research expertise. I sat there and kept thinking "who wrote this? Who was the target audience? What are they trying to achieve?" Still not sure if I got it "right" but I thought it was pretty funny that was the question that made me sweat.
I hate that multiple choice is replacing time devoted to complex critical thought. But unfortunately, even beyond school, the standardized testing goes on for your whole life in many fields.