On Thursday & Friday, I was at an all-day professional development workshop in Brooklyn, which means my students had two different substitutes on those days. I created a packet that reviews graphing inequalities on the coordinate plane, which is part of our current unit on inequalities. On the last page, I decided to create several "written responses" similar to what it would be like on the NYS exam for mathematics in April. The students were instructed to graph two inequalities, one parabola and one line, and shade the point of intersection. Then, they were to determine if two different points "made the system of inequalities true". On the bottom, students got a word problem that involved writing, graphing and solving a system of inequalities and were to write a two-three sentence explanation of their answer to the word problem. I thought the instructions were pretty clear and expected no problems.
However, when I came back from the professional development session after school on Friday to pick up the packets to grade over the weekend, I saw that answers on the packet were TERRIBLE. Of course, I only glanced at a couple papers, and my optimistic self thought "well, these are only a couple papers, I'm sure all the others are great.", so I took the papers, placed them in my folder and walked to the subway station. I took out my folder when the train arrived and got a thorough look at each of the papers in my stack.What I saw confirmed the "glance" I got at the school: only about one in five of my students fulfilled all the requirements of the problems. Many students blatantly ignored HALF THE PROBLEM. Others didn't show enough work and only wrote down the answer. Some clearly didn't read the directions, as their responses didn't answer a single part of the question and had wrong numbers, wrong graphs,etc. I literally sat on the subway about ready to cry/rant/explode. When I got to the apartment, I was already so on the verge to cry that my roommates took my folder away from me for a good hour or so and helped me calm down.
The dreaded part came later that night and today when I actually had to grade the awful packets. Many of my students earned D's and F's on the packets, since I graded them based on how the state will grade them in April. I wrote "Make sure you read the directions and answer all parts of the question" countless times on countless papers. The only good part was the questions that didn't have multiple steps went great... my students understand the concepts and how to solve the problems, but are struggling with the written response aspect. Great. Well, the state isn't going to test how well my kids know the concept, they are testing written responses and multi-step problems, they are testing what I did on the last page... the page where 80% of my students failed.
When I see my classes on Monday, I'm going to give them a stern lecture about written responses and answering the questions. I'm going to need to set aside some time to work on extended response skills. Well, I thought I wasn't going to let test prep take over my life, but it is. I feel really overwhelmed with this. And the sad part is that my kids actually know how to do this!
Teachers, how do you improve extended response skills in your classes?
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