Tests

So I bought this test-preparation workbook, 2nd grade level, to serve as a test to see where Kyrie's at. I want to be able to reuse the workbook with Elijah next year, so I told her to write down the answers in her notebook instead of writing in the workbook itself.

Kyrie was half an hour into her first test before I realized that, instead of writing down just the letter of the right answer, she was copying the whole question down, including little circles for each answer, and then filling the circle in on the right answer.

Not surprisingly, she went a lot faster once I told her just to copy down the letter of the right answer.  (Which I thought I had said in the first place, but I guess I didn't make it clear.)

In a semi-related note, I'm reading a book called What's Math Got to Do with It?.  (Is it grammatically correct to put a period at the end of a declarative sentence that references or quotes something which ends in a question mark?)

It's a very good book - I highly recommend it to anyone who (a) homeschools their kids, (b) teaches math at a school, (c) is the parent of a kid in school, or (d) didn't like math in school and wonders why.  It does a lot (so far) to say what is wrong with the way most schools teach math and how to fix it.

One of the issues it deals with is the negative effect of our approach to test-taking.  This reinforces some of what I got out of the Montessori book about how to approach tests, but adds in some ways to do positive assessments.  Once I finish the book, maybe I'll do a fuller review.