I am in the processing of administering post-test SLOs ( motto: Education. We generate new acronyms for the same old ideas. SLO stands for student learning objectives) to first graders. The test has two parts and takes 2 weeks to administer. This means that four weeks of curriculum are taken up with testing. Factoring in field trips, assemblies, days when there is a .01% chance of snow within 500 miles, and the last two weeks of school because of field days, awards days and days when the teachers take the kids outside until specials and bring them to you smelling like wet sheep that had just rolled in their own poo and you have to spend half the class period getting them to stop bleating, means that if you teach each class only once a week, that can be a loss of 12 out of 36 lessons--a third of the curriculum!
So just because the core subjects are forced to administer high stakes testing round the clock, the specials classes need to share in this joy, too. Our fun test is given to the first graders because I don't know why. The first part of the test uses a scantron form and is in multiple guess format. The second part is an oral and written assessment that has to be administered one on one. When it comes to the one on one part, no one thought about what to do with students who are not taking the test. First graders can entertain themselves for about 3 minutes before finding ways to amuse each other, i.e. throwing crayons, eating erasers, playing chase the dust motes or shrieking.
It's hard to decide which part is the most fun. Some first graders have mastered the fine art of bubbling in answers. (This is even more fun in the beginning of the year when these little guys have no idea what bubbling in an answer means, nor do they have the fine motor skills to accomplish this. I was told to bubble in the answers for them, which I can't believe is not a testing violation.) I use this activity to find out who has OCD--those are the kids that color in the circle, erase the microscopic stray lines, color in some more, erase some more, and then cry when they have made a hole in the answer sheet or they can still see remnants of that microscopic stray lines that are only visible with an electron microscope. And then you get the kids that have just transferred in from a galaxy far ,far away, and are clueless about what you do with a bubble sheet, unless you consider making pretty patterns a viable use. I got two aliens this week. One of them thought that he should only use question 1 to record all his answers, so he colored in A, for question 1, B for question 2 and then on the 3rd question he thought the answers was A and he tried to color in the A bubble again. After amusing myself by watching him try to puzzle out what to do, I decided to stop torturing him and explained, for the third time, how bubble sheets work. . The other student decided not to record his answers on the bubble portion and wrote them on the top of the paper, even after I pointed to the letters on the bubble sheet and showed him what to do Somewhere on Mars a mother is worrying about her missing child.
Part One's Fun
The first question asks the student to identify the rhythm pattern that
was clapped. It's pretty easy because there's a rest in the example
and if the student has any visual ability, he can see that I touch my
shoulders on the rest. Some teachers hold both hands out to indicate a
rest and I've seen a few people say, "shh," which I think isn't that
great an idea because a rest is supposed to indicate a silence and
"shhhh" isn't silent. .At any rate, there's a visual cue.
The second question asks the student to identify which pattern was sung. This requires the student be able to read simple solfege patterns on the staff.. That means I am forced to teach reading notes on the staff, something which I t would rather do in second grade because the research shows that younger children should be aurally identifying and decoding music patterns--in other words, developing their musical ear The note reading, which John Feierabend calls, "paper training" is more developmentally appropriate to start in second grade so I compromise and start teaching note reading a week before the test because that's as close to second grade as I can get. Anyone can be taught to read music but f musicality hasn't been developed, the reading part is useless. I remember when many high school students would tell me they studied piano for elebenty thousand years and I would expect to hear the great great great grandchild of Liszt but instead would get a sonatina that was played by Pinocchio.
When I do start note reading on the staff, I use five lines. The test uses a two
line staff; I redraw it and make it a five line staff. . Many Kodaly
teachers use a laborious process of going from a two line, then a three
line staff and I assume somewhere after post doctorate work, the five
line staff is introduced. I can find no research anywhere that shows
that reading a two and then three line staff is necessary. We aren't
taught to read half a word in first grade and then the second half in
third grade. Many students find it confusing, as do I, to go from 2, 3
and the 5 lines. And if you have any students who study an instrument,
then they really are confused (Those who struggle with note reading, I am willing
to bet, have some form of dysgraphia. or learning disability and probably wouldn't do any better with fewer lines on the staff. To many students mapping the concept of up and down or higher and lower is difficult to not only aurally identify, but visually as well. I
haven't done any scientific research, so this is anecdotal evidence, but
every time I have a student who struggles reading notes on the staff, I
ask the teacher about his reading skills and 11 out of 10 times, that
student struggles with reading as well as other types of symbolic
decoding).
After I sing so la mi mi, I ask the student to point to the example that I sang. When the student has pointed to his answer , I ask him to check his response and point to each note as I sing it. Sometimes if the student has pointed to the wrong answer, he will correct it. Sometimes he will stick to his guns. Then I ask follow-up questions: Can the student aurally identify if the pitches are going up (higher) or down (lower)? Can the student show me which pitches on the staff represent upward or downward movement? Can the student show me repeated (same) notes?
I ask the students several follow-up questions because I want to know how much the student understands about staff
reading. Getting the answer wrong or right doesn't tell me much . For example, today a student pointed to the correct answer the
first time I sang it. I asked her to point to the notes that were the
same or repeated. She pointed to the first two notes, which are not
the same. One is on the line of the staff and one is on a space. One
is higher than the other one. I asked her if the second note was higher
or lower than the first one. She couldn't tell me. Then I asked her if
the last two notes, which are the same pitches, were the same . She
said no. I asked her if they were repeated notes. " No," she said,
Clearly she didn't understand same and different when it came to
repeated notes or notes on different lines and spaces. It was a student
who had just enrolled a few days ago---yeah--two weeks left until the
end of the year and we're still getting transfers. I gave her credit
for the right answer, even though I'm not at all convinced she knew what
she was doing. I'm not sure what she was confused about, but I do know
that I need to work with her a little more. And I also know that I
would not have known any of this if I had given the test without
interviewing the students.
Part whoopdee doo two
This part of the test requires the students to write a four beat
pattern using a combination of quarters, eighths and quarter rests and then echo me as I sing so la mi mi, which is now really starting to grate on my nerves.
After the students write their four beat masterpiece they have to say it using rhythm syllables such as ta and ta ti as well as clap it, and I grade them based
on a rubric that I believe was possibly translated from Aramaic to English and then run through Google translate. It goes something like this: If
the student can clap and say the rhythm and keep a consistent tempo
while standing on one leg and swatting flies, then he gets a perfect
score of 10. If the student makes one mistake and finishes his opus
before lunch that's a 7. If the student writes hieroglyphics or claps
something completely different from what he wrote and you can not detect
a steady beat at any time,, or speaks in tongues but maintains a steady
beat, that's a 3. If the student stares at you and doesn't move,
that's a 0.
That is why multiple guess tests and data give an incomplete picture. The SLOs are just SLAs (S**hitty Little Assessments) That plus the fact that we are also asked to assess whether a student can echo sing correctly using head tone. Ok, I don't mind assessing that, but some students for reasons both physical and/or developmental can't do that. But why should the teacher be accountable for that assessment? I have a kid who has some congenital larynx malformation and can not use his head tone. His score from pre to post did not improve, yet conceivably, if the county decided to tie teacher compensation to test results, that would count against me. That just .....
S**tty Little Objectionable tests.
