Things like this don't help the public's perceptions of standardized tests:
Students at the Maryland School for the Deaf were asked on a standardized test to match words containing similar sounds, and state education officials promised to adjust the scores after acknowledging the problem.
The state Department of Education also will ensure that questions in this year's version of the Maryland School Assessment are appropriate for hearing-impaired students, spokesman Bill Reinhard said Monday.
The changes follow complaints by James E. Tucker, superintendent of the Maryland School for the Deaf, that the reading section of the test asked third- and fourth-grade students to match pairs of words with similar sounds, such as the vowel sound in "castle" and "manner."
"As a deaf person, I'm not familiar with sounds," Tucker told The Frederick News-Post. "I have a problem answering these questions myself, and I'm an education man."
More grist for the one-size-doesn't-fit-all mill, I suppose. Makes me wonder, too, how many of those I'd've gotten wrong as a kid, with my pronounced Southern accent. I still don't rhyme "route" with "boot", for example, although I suppose the test developers were canny enough to bypass those words with extreme regional variance in pronounciation.
Posted by kswygert at January 11, 2005 04:43 PM