This dog won’t hunt

I came across this from a PowerPoint on Smarter Balanced’s item design (from page 29):

Call me crazy, but I think you can dog someone to take a run with you and then go for a swim and later doll yourself up. In other words, four of the five words can be used as both verbs and nouns, but the kids are supposed to mark the “correct” answer. (There is no indication that the question was coupled with any passage that actually used the words, and even if it had been, that’s not reflected in the wording of the question.)

Questions like this, apparently, are what will give us “incredible precision in identifying skills that students have mastered,” which is why we should pay top dollar for Smarter Balanced. I feel sorry for the teacher whose job evaluation depends on her students’ scores on this kind of test. I feel sorry for the kids, too.

The question reminded me of Tom Hoffman’s post describing a hopelessly written Pearson test question. As Hoffman wrote:

Not only can the teacher not easily ignore these exercises, there is tangible risk in teaching students to question or critique them too closely, as this would be likely to lead to students answering questions “incorrectly” on standardized tests.

So the lesson is “Don’t critique the test too closely.” Brought to you by Smarter Balanced.
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