Is asking about secrets a good way to prod kids to write?
A New Jersey parent complained about a question on a state exam that asked third-graders to write about a secret and why it was hard to keep. His complaints have led the state to re-evaluate the use of the question.
This is the second news story in recent weeks about the integrity of a test question on a standardized exam. A few weeks ago, there was an outcry about a question on an 8th New York reading exam that asked about race between a hare and a talking pineapple. I read the passage and the questions and have to admit they were strange.
In this new case, parent Richard Goldberg objected when his twin 9-year-old sons told him that the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge asked them to write about a personal secret.
Is this a legitimate complaint? The point of the question was clearly to prod kids to write, not pry into family secrets.
“All of the sudden, you have in a sense Big Brother checking out the secrets of families,” he said.
Goldberg felt the question ventured into topics that would best be kept quiet, and that it could raise some serious complications: What would test-graders do if the secret revealed has to do with a crime? And why would that question be asked anyway? New Jersey’s state Education Department is reviewing what happened.
Susan Engel, a lecturer in psychology and director of the teaching program at Williams University, said the question doesn’t sound troubling to her. Asking about secrets is a good way to get children to write, she said. And, she said, children at that age are unlikely to say something that would offend their families, or even bare their own souls. “I think by and large, kids are not going to tell a real secret,” she said.
Last month, New York education officials said they would not score six multiple-choice questions about a passage from an eighth-grade reading exam about a hare and a talking pineapple after complaints that the passage, and the questions about it, did not make sense. And later, they acknowledged finding errors on math tests given to fourth- and eighth-graders.
Justin Barra, spokesman for New Jersey’s state Education Department, said the state is looking into who wrote the “secret” question. He said the question itself is being tested and that it was vetted for appropriateness by both the department and a panel of teachers. He said it was given in 15 districts to about 4 percent of the third-graders statewide who took the exam. Like other experimental questions, the answers will not count toward students’ scores.
He also said that while the department has fielded calls from several journalists, officials have not had many complaints from parents. Barra said he did not know whether the fact that the question was revealed in public would keep it off future tests — or what scorers would do if a crime was revealed. He said he could not say where the question was given or provide the exact wording because some students who were absent still must take makeup tests.
A further complication may be that at least some teachers tell their students that they can make up their answers if they don’t have real-life examples to give. What matters, the teachers say, is the form of the writing, not whether what they say is true.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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28 comments Add your comment
Old timer
May 11th, 2012
7:43 pm
I would say…no one thought about family secrets……in third grade…friends have secrets…..but again no one thought…..they were trying to pick an easy topic.
Beverly Fraud
May 11th, 2012
7:56 pm
I will have to admit this writing prompt gave me a pause for thought:
“Write a story providing an iron clad alibi for your principal and testing coordinator, proving that they couldn’t have had anything to do with an astronomically high number of wrong to right erasures.”
I know they want to encourage creative writing, but still…
dubious
May 11th, 2012
8:16 pm
What did they plan to do if a child revealed they were being abused?
mathmom
May 11th, 2012
8:58 pm
And I thought only the Georgia Department of Education assessment architects were incompetent.
bootney farnsworth
May 11th, 2012
11:01 pm
what a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do.
Ron F.
May 11th, 2012
11:08 pm
Whether it is good psychologically or not, that just seems like a strange topic. The problem is that we rush these tests through, and clearly mistakes and nonsense questions are going to become more frequent. It just adds to the argument that we’re testing too much and testing the wrong things the wrong way. Yes, we need to have quantifiable data to show what kids know, but there has to be a better way to do it.
Sade
May 12th, 2012
1:49 am
The objective was to determine the child’s writing skills. Even though I’ve told my students to make up something if the topic doesn’t apply to them they might not be skilled in creative writing. To ask a child to reveal a secret is asking them to break a trust; that is one epic fail.
dubious
May 12th, 2012
6:04 am
It bothers” me to no end that teachers instruct students to “make things up” on this sort of writing assessment. My children received the same instruction from their teachers prior to the Georgia 8th grade writing assessment. They were told they needed to provide specific examples and quotes to support their thesis and they should make them up if they needed to. Teaching children to fabricate quotes and statistics for their writing is extremely damaging – both to their developing writing skills and to their sense of ethics. If it is okay to cheat by making things up, why isn’t it okay to cheat by copying someone else’s work?
puzzling choice
May 12th, 2012
7:24 am
I first thought this would be an interesting way to get kids to write but I pictured myself at this same age, raised in a devout Catholic family which held maintaining privacy right up there with the major sins. I would not have been able to do this by making something up, that would have been a lie- I was a pretty concrete thinker back when I was 8/9. But even more anxiety provoking would have been the thought that I divulged something. This would have been an awful assignment because of the moral dilemma it would have posed. Perhaps that isn’t the norm to have strictures on secrets held so high at that age but there are plenty of dysfunctional families where secret keeping has quite a great deal of threat added in. Would that really be a necessary part of a test that is looking at writing samples, was there no other prompts that could have inspired?
Now, if it had been phrased as a dream instead of a secret, that would have been a whole other thing.
A Conservative Voice
May 12th, 2012
7:36 am
Do the works “NAZI GERMANY” mean anything to any of you? You know folks, this is how we lose our freedoms. They start with the children…….”Do your parents like BHO? Why don’t they? What have your parents said about the regime? Do you have a gun in your house? Be careful, folks, it starts out innocous enough and before you know it, somebody’s in jail being interrogated and maybe even tortured. It’s happened before, it can happen again. This whole “secret” thing needs to be “Nipped In The Bud”.
Mary Grabar
May 12th, 2012
7:47 am
This question is a violation of privacy, has nothing to do with what schools should be teaching, and is all too common in textbooks. When I was assigned textbooks for freshman composition at one of our illustrious industrial state factories of higher learning, I made the mistake of allowing students to choose from all the questions at the end of one of the sections. I had girls telling me heartbreaking stories about being pressured by parents and other adults to have abortions. The questions cited in this article are indicative of the trends now that education is run by the descendents of the mindless, stoned-out hippie followers of Mao.
irisheyes
May 12th, 2012
8:17 am
Oh, good grief, take off the tin hats. This isn’t some government plot to brainwash your kids into being little clones of the President. First of all, it’s New Jersey, where the governor is on the short list for the REPUBLICAN nomination. Secondly, it’s trying to get the students to write about something that’s relevant to them. All students have kept a “secret” at some time. Was it the smartest question? Probably not, but it’s certainly not an attempt to have everyone shouting “Heil” either.
irisheyes
May 12th, 2012
8:19 am
Sorry, that’s the REPUBLICAN vice-presidential nomination. Hard to type with a nine month old using you as a climbing toy.
NWGA Teacher
May 12th, 2012
8:19 am
Children own their secrets, as do adults. Children are taught to do as they’re told. When a teacher tells them, through a test question, to give up a secret, some of them will do just that. We have no right to extract their secrets. This has to stop.
Jack
May 12th, 2012
8:38 am
They’re messing with a kid’s head with questions like that. Better to ask them about their summer plans.
mountain man
May 12th, 2012
9:01 am
If the child reveals anything that suggests abuse, the teacher is bound BY LAW to report it. Even waiting 24 hours can get them in trouble (there was a teacher and counselor just prosecuted for this – they revealed the suspected abuse, just not immediately). That is whether it is “made up” or not.
Do we want to open this can of worms? Or was that the purpose of this exercise?
It would be funny though, if they wrote about their teacher helping them cheat on a test and asked them to keep it secret.
redweather
May 12th, 2012
9:11 am
I get the feeling some people fear that such a question would prompt a student to reveal a family secret. Got news for you, your kids probably volunteer stuff about their family life that would make many parents uncomfortable.
I love teaching. I hate what it is becoming...
May 12th, 2012
10:08 am
@Dubious “Teaching children to fabricate quotes and statistics for their writing is extremely damaging – both to their developing writing skills and to their sense of ethics. If it is okay to cheat by making things up, why isn’t it okay to cheat by copying someone else’s work?”
This is the exact reaction many teachers have when faced with writing prompts that require informational writing on a topic students know little to nothing about. We spend years teaching them that plagiarizing, making up facts, and not citing sources is wrong – then tell them “except on this really important test where we WANT you to make up stuff!” It is confusing to students and puts teachers in a position of having to contradict themselves and look dishonest.
Tony
May 12th, 2012
10:34 am
The whole writing assessment process is messed up from the start. First, the students are given topics based on the four main genres emphasized in our curriculum. They are not given sufficient time for drafting, proofing and rewriting. They are not give access to resources to establish facts. They are not allowed to check for spelling using dictionaries or other resources. All these limits distort the writing process we are trying to teach our children. There are so many things wrong with the writing assessment i don’t have time to list them all today.
Second, the rubrics used for scoring the writing assessment are vague and allow considerable subjectivity. For some reason, too many people have bought into the idea that everything can be measured and assessed through formalized methods. English teachers have joked before that even Shakespeare would not pass today’s writing assessments.
@mountain man – teachers are not allowed to look at the writing tests from students and therefore would not be able to report any suspected abuse that is revealed. And @redweather, you are right. Kids tell us just about everything that is happening in the home.
crankee-yankee
May 12th, 2012
11:13 am
@Conservative Voice
You couldn’t be more correct. The further we get away from heinous acts of the past, the less that is remembered, which leads to repetition of the mistakes. Hitler’s Reich mined the country’s youth for info on their parents. Is it too far-fetched to think that could not happen here if either extreme gained control? Frightening.
RCB
May 12th, 2012
12:28 pm
When my kids were in elementary school 20 years ago in Colorado, the rage was “creative” writing over writing that was spelled correctly or made sense. Three times a week it was 30 minutes of creative writing. Even back then there were many referrals made to administrators for “findings” in creative writing. I was uncomfortable with it then and still am. What’s wrong with having all students write on the same topic–something generic? What about “Why I would like (or not like) to be a scientist” or “How I would choose a brand new puppy.”
Hillbilly D
May 12th, 2012
12:34 pm
To whomever thought this one up, your’s was a truly lame-brained idea.
Hillbilly D
May 12th, 2012
12:37 pm
What matters, the teachers say, is the form of the writing, not whether what they say is true.
Isn’t that the kind of thinking that caused a Pulitzer Prize winner or two to have to give back their award?
Shar
May 12th, 2012
12:39 pm
This reminds me of a story my husband’s cousin tells about reviewing a young man’s application for employment in the family’s Alabama foundry business. Along with open boxes in which to put the applicant’s name, address, etc, there was one labelled “sex”. This very young man wrote, “Once. In Arab.”
Most adults would know that the labelled box was not asking for very personal information, and if that information had been requested they would have known they didn’t have to supply it. Young children (and this applicant) very often lack both the discernment to understand what kind of information should be included and the confidence to refuse to supply it when it is inappropriate to do so.
I can understand using this kind of prompt if there is reason to believe that a secret in a child’s life (abuse, deprivation, etc) is damaging the child and he or she finds it easier to write than to speak directly. Putting it on a general test is invasive, disrespectful and wrong.
Cassie
May 12th, 2012
5:52 pm
Teachers are bound by law to report abuse within 24 hours to law enforcement. Are test graders held to the same legal standard? What if a child discloses abuse?
Truth in Moderation
May 13th, 2012
2:15 am
Teachers WAKE UP! This Bloom’s Taxonomy HOTS questioning from the Affective Domain has been going on since the 80’s! Ask Anita Hogue. She exposed these kind of test questions on the Pennsylvania state test back in the late 80’s. Her story is documented in this book.. .http://www.amazon.com/Educating-New-World-Order-Eakman/dp/0894202782/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336889299&sr=1-4
Read it.
Good Mother
May 13th, 2012
7:16 am
Ludicrous. This question is absolutely outrageous. HOW did this question ever get vetted and approved? We have sickos in our school system.
Yankee Prof
May 14th, 2012
8:33 am
I’d say it was an innocently intended, but not very carefully thought out, question. As earlier commentators have said, children aren’t fully ready to discern levels or propriety. The test-writers have certainly left themselves open to problems, both regarding questions of privacy such as that brought up by the parent in the story or questions of responsibility if a child self-reports a “secret” that falls into criminal jurisdiction.
I see the same lack of discernment in college students. As an instructor of Composition, I’ve stopped giving assignments that can be interpreted as encouraging such personal revelation. I’ve received too many secrets and confessions that I am not trained to address. It can be both heartbreaking and disconcerting.