Teaching To The Test--The Right Way

But per an article in today's New York Times, the Harlem Success Academy is taking test prep into a whole new arena: rural america. Apparently, New York tests repeatedly ask students questions about "livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience,"--questions which often flummox urban students.  Recognizing this trend, the renowned charter school recently took all 75 of its kindergarteners on a trip to a farm.  The article describes the trip as an attempt to "leave no potential test point unexplored."

The theory behind Harlem Success Academy's trip was simple: research has repeatedly shown that "prior knowledge of a subject can significantly improve a child's performance on a test." As this blog has explained in the past, if you don't know anything about curling, you're going to do poorly on a reading passage that deals with that sport, even if you understand all the words on the page.  Correspondingly, if you're a kid who thinks that  chicken comes from pigs (probably due to repeated interaction with packaged meat) you're going to do poorly on a test passage dealing with those animals.  The value of prior knowledge manifests itself in other subjects as well: for example, if you don't know that corn grows in stalks, you're going to have a tough time with a math question about "ears" and "stalks" of corn.

So if you're a potential donor out there and you really want to improve New York City students' test scores, maybe you ought to designate your gift for a school trip to the farm.  Or (since questions about colonial times often pop up on these types of tests) maybe a trip to Williamsburg might be in order.  Come to think of it, anything that broadens children's horizons is likely to help them on standardized tests.  Which, in turn, suggests that this form of "test prep" may not be test prep at all--but rather, an actual education.