Reading Tests

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!