After graded homework, classroom tests offer the next best piece of information for a parent to use to assess how well their child is doing in a particular classroom, with particular content, and with a particular teacher.
We have all had personal experience with this type of test. They are either developed by the classroom teacher or the publisher/author of the particular curriculum/textbook being used, and administered throughout the year. They are composed of a variety of types of questions: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true-false, matching, definitions, and the dreaded - essay question. Their purpose is to assess understanding and mastery of content in a particular subject content as of a particular point in time. Tests may be chapter specific, or cumulative for the mid-term or semester. When used in a conventional school setting, the test scores serve as a basis for computing a class grade for each student.
Even if your student is scoring well and carries a high grade, there is still a lot of learning and understanding that can be done through the evaluation of the test results. This is an opportunity to look for patterns of errors within the tests. Try not to overlook your student's strengths, and make sure that the strength you acknowledge is more specific than the 'good' grade.
What to look for? I look first to see if I can find a pattern in the problems missed. Did the student answer the question completely? On a mathematics test, my son misses the problem if he doesn't put the units measure down as part of his answer. I usually look at him and say something like, "Is this 10 giraffes, onions, yards?" We smile about it, but the problem is still wrong. That missed problem is categorized as "Units missing".
When there are two parts to the question, there should be two answers. This is another time where students commonly miss points. If your student can write on the test document given to them, teach him to circle key words in the question, and to number the parts. Then, coach him to write his answer numbered in correspondence with the test question. When my son misses a multi-part problem in his homework or on a test, I classify that error as "Incomplete Answer".
By working with your student when looking over the test, you can get a feel for which questions the student answered but didn't know. These I classify as "Knowledge". It tells me that there needs to be more studying, or that we need to catch this lack of understanding through the homework assignments, rather than at chapter testing time. If we have a lot of 'knowledge' errors, we review in more detail how the student prepared for the test, and talk about ways that we might improve his study process.
In mathematics, there is also an additional category, "Computation". This classification tells me that my student understood how to approach the problem - had the knowledge - gave a complete answer, but a wrong answer - because he made an error in the computation. The answer is still wrong, but my concern is less. I communicate to him that I'm concerned he miscalculated, but I can see that he understood how to approach and solve the problem. I emphasize that knowing how to solve the problem is the main issue. Then, I stress how important it is to take care to do the computation accurately.
After we have looked over all the questions from test, I look at the number items by category and analyze what that tells me. Do I have a student whose test grade has resulted not from a lack of understanding, but from a series of computational mistakes? Or, do I have a majority of "knowledge" items. How we strategize improving his results on the next tests, has everything to do with understanding what is going wrong right now. More importantly, the student needs to understand his test taking and study habits for himself, and learn to do this kind of analysis on his own. As a younger student, we talked about what methods he could employ to increase his 'knowledge' leading up to a test. Emphasizing how his grade was lowered because of computational errors or a failure to answer the whole test question, helps make him more aware during the next test.
If you begin encouraging this kind of attention to detail with classroom testing, you'll find that the student improves in the long run and develops much better test taking habits. As a parent, though, you are doing so much more. You are communicating that you want to understand at a deep level, more than just the grade. Rather than taking the easy way out and giving your student the "You'll have to study harder." feedback, you are communicating and demonstrating that you are trying to understand his abilities and understanding at a deeper level, modelling how he can understand to the same thing independent of you.
What methods have you employed to help your student understand his test results?
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