Student Learning Plans: Helpful or Frustrating?

In my last post, I talked about how standardized tests are inefficient because a student scoring badly on a standardized test is not necessarily indicative of a lack of knowledge. This has been proven to me in my own personal experiences both with taking standardized tests and with prepping students to take them.

The 4^th graders I tutor in English for their Ohio Achievement Tests (OAT’s) each have their own Student Learning Plans that tell me what they did not score well on during practice tests and thus need to review and build skills upon.  I thought the learning plans would be extremely helpful in directing me to the needs of each student. However, what I soon found was that every single student had the same student learning plan. Each plan has the students name on it, their grade level, and their parent signature showing that they have reviewed the plan and agree to the tutoring program. But how is it possible that every single student has the same weaknesses? I tutor 5 students, all 5 coming from different elementary schools, so surely it can’t be a specific teacher or school at fault for this. If it is merely a coincidence, it is the biggest one I have ever seen. This aspect of the learning plans is less alarming to me than when I actually began to put them into action, though.

One of the first things my student learning plans told me was that my students needed to work on homonyms, homographs, and homophones. This was not surprising to me, considering I am a junior in college and know quite a few peers who could use a refresher course in these themselves.  However, when I began a lesson on them, my students had no problem identifying the correct usage of the words I gave them. They were given a list of 40 words sharing the same spelling and pronunciation, and they only incorrectly used 5 of them. Which lead me to wonder…

Did the practice OAT just happen to ask them to use the 5 sets of words they didn’t know?

Did my students not understand the question?

Did they run out of time and not make it to those questions?

Were they simply not trying on the practice OAT?

I find the first possibility to be highly unlikely, but the last 3 are each probable. If my students didn’t understand the question, how can I ensure that won’t happen again? And if they had trouble understanding that question, there are potentially quite a few more they had trouble comprehending. If they just ran out of time and weren’t able to make it to those questions, there isn’t much I can do at all to help them but remind them to answer the easier questions first and save the hard questions for last. For those students that just decided not to try their hardest on the test, it would be hard to pour on the importance of the test any thicker than I already have. What is scary to me is that these situations are out of my control. If students simply did not know the material, that I could work on. But if students are more than competent when I have them do the work then score badly on tests, what can I do to make them better at taking standardized tests?

If anyone has an answer to that, I would be forever indebted to you.