January is traditionally our
time for Reading Tests. We as Knowledge for Children conduct these tests to
monitor the impact of our programs. We have a standardized test which we use to
see how many words a child can read in a minute. The test starts with
two-letter words and gets more and more difficult.
We do this because fraud with
exams is common practise what makes it difficult to measure any impact based on
exams. We see pupils in class six who read only five words in our test, but
that school has a 100% score in the exams… So we need our own tools. We have
not yet started analysing, so I can’t say anything yet about the results
compared to previous years.
Our testing is unannounced and
we do random sampling in the classes. If we announce our test the school is
very likely to send the dull pupils home for a day and have only smart ones in
class. Also teachers complain about the pupils we test; ‘if you make us do the
sampling you will see that they can read!’ They want us to only look at the
smartest children in class so it looks like all pupils can read well.
Some things are always
remarkable when we do the testing. We see for example pupils who read the word
‘up’ as ‘youp’ or even ‘youpee’. They obviously recognise some letters, and
know their names. But they are not able to read and don’t know the sounds of
the letters. (Try reading simple words while only using the letter names… You
will get confused!) Something similar happens to pupils who can read the sounds
like i …. s…. but are unable to bring these two sounds together to form ‘is’.
These children at least
recognise letters or sounds. In various cases you see children in class 2 (we
test in class 2-4-6) who are not even making it that far. The first word in our
test this year was ‘to’. I had one child who started reading and said ‘to’. So
I was very happy! Until the child read the second word (‘at’) as fifty-four,
‘is’ as eighty-seven and ‘he’ as sixteen. Obviously he just guessed something
and didn’t even see we were giving him words, not numbers.
Sometimes it is really
discouraging to see that pupils can’t even differentiate a word from a number.
But we also meet children who do so well and teachers who really try to do
their very best. It is for these people that we will continue!
