“Simple practice effects” and the SAT

Useful article in the Washington Post re: standardized testing and fairness: No one likes the SAT. It’s still the fairest thing about admissions.

I’ll post some of the sections on income and scores in a bit, but this section on tutoring caught my eye:

Highly paid tutors make bold claims about how much they can raise SAT scores (“my students routinely improve their scores by more than 400 points”), but there is no peer-reviewed scientific evidence that coaching can reliably provide more than a modest boost — especially once simple practice effects and other expected improvements from retaking a test are accounted for. For the typical rich kid, a more realistic gain of 50 points would represent the difference between the average students at Syracuse and No. 197 University of Colorado at Boulder — significant, perhaps, but not dramatic.

By Jonathan Wai, Matt Brown and Christopher Chabris | 3/22/2019

Simple practice effects !

yeesh

Admissions fraud, take 2

One of the topics Ed and I enjoy being mutually scandalized over is the fact that people are willing to pay upwards of $70K/year to send their kids to college. Even worse: a fair number of people are willing to go into debt for that amount just to underwrite four years of undergraduate education.

Go to school four years, spend 40 years paying the bill — mind blowing. 

But the admissions fraud story has reactivated our family motto. It’s always worse than you think. 

Never did it cross our minds that there were parents who, in order to get their children into a good college, were willing to risk going to jail.

I feel wet behind the ears.

And see:
Admissions fraud, take 1
Admissions fraud, take 2
Admissions fraud and extra time

Admissions fraud, take 1

Take 1: they should have hired me to tutor their kids.

Except for the part about bribing coaches, of course. 

I know that’s a flippant reaction, but flippant or no, it was one of the first thoughts I had.

If you want your child to have higher scores, it’s much safer to hire a good tutor than to pay people to take the test for him or her. 

And see:
Admissions fraud, take 1
Admissions fraud, take 2
Admissions fraud and extra time

EGGs and NEGGs

A core principle we were taught at Morningside Academy’s Summer School Institute: whenever you introduce a concept, you must always provide not only examples, but nonexamples, as well, especially what Kent Johnson called “close-in nonexamples.”

A close-in nonexample is close but no cigar. 

Test prep and tutoring in Paris

We’ll be in Paris this summer !

I haven’t lived in Paris since Ed and I met, so I’m excited. We both are.

While I’m there, I’d love to work with some students on test prep and/or writing, so if you have French friends with kids, I’d be grateful if you could forward this link:

Test Prep in Paris this June

How to prepare students for ACT English

Here’s what I learned about coaching ACT English.

Don’t teach commas.

Teach sentences.

ACT results: 82nd percentile to 96th

	4/29/2017: Timed practice test	6/9/2017 ACT	9/8/2017 ACT
English	27 – 85th %	34 – 98th %	35 – 99th %
Reading	23 – 66th %	30 – 88th %	31 – 91st %
Comp. 1	26 (est.) – 82nd %	29 – 92nd %	31 – 96th %

National Distributions of Cumulative Percents for ACT Test Scores ACT-Tested High School Graduates from 2015, 2016 and 2017

^{1. The composite score includes all four sections of the ACT: English, reading, math, science. ↩}

Worldly knowledge, dyslexia, J— and L— B., and Cliff Clavin

Katharine mentioned earlier that we’ve been thinking about worldly knowledge and dreamy children.

The idea that there exists a category of knowledge (worldly knowledge?) that’s important to success on ACT/SAT reading but can’t be acquired through a rich, knowledge-based curriculum had never crossed my mind.

That said, our conversations reminded me of a story a friend told me some years back.

His wife, he said, was profoundly dyslexic. She was so dyslexic that she read nothing at all–at least, nothing beyond what she absolutely had to read for work. She’d gone to college, and had been able to get through her textbooks, but reading had never become anything more than a chore, and she never, ever read “for pleasure.”

The result, he said, was that she “didn’t know anything.”

Meaning: she didn’t know anything anyone talked about at parties or over dinner. She didn’t get the references.

My own head is so stuffed full of useless knowledge (I have a soft spot for Cliff Clavin, kindred soul), that I had trouble even imagining what my friend was talking about. So I kept asking for examples.

Finally he said his wife had never heard of J— and L—– B—–.¹

Now that got my attention. At the time, the entire world was talking about J&L-B–literally the entire world, if you believe Wikipedia, which I do–yet my friend’s wife did not know who they were.

She didn’t know because she didn’t read—-anything. No newspapers, no women’s magazines (which still existed then). If she was standing in the check-out lane at the supermarket, she didn’t pick up the Enquirer and speed-read the stories so she wouldn’t have to pay for it; she didn’t even scan the headlines. She didn’t read.

“Doesn’t she watch TV?” I said. “Doesn’t she hear these things on TV?”

She did watch TV, my friend said, as much as anyone else watches TV, but she still didn’t know anything. It was amazing how little information a person actually picks up from TV.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

Do we really absorb next to nothing from casual television watching?

Compared to casual National Enquirer skimming at the grocery store?

And if so, would that have changed with the advent of multiple cable news channels and “infotainment”?

Here’s my question: is there a kind of “junk reading” that we think of as a waste of time but that actually serves a purpose — and might come in handy on college entrance exams to boot?

^{1. I’m using initials instead of names because there’s no reason these two need to see themselves on our blog or anyone else’s. I know next to nothing about the “right to be forgotten,” but I’m probably in favor. So: initials.↩}

Help desk

Here’s a question a friend just asked re: the following–

I live with my father in the summer, when I’m on vacation from school.

Why does that comma make sense?

The handbook rule (speaking of main and subordinate clauses) is that we use commas  when the subordinate clause introduces the main clause, but not when the subordinate clause follows the main clause:

I wake up early because I like to walk the dogs before I go to work.

Because I like to walk the dogs before I go to work, I wake up early.

The “I live with my father” sentence seems to break that rule, but it ‘sounds right,’ so the question is why is that.

Why does the comma after summer sound right?

My guess is that “when I’m on vacation from school” is functioning as a kind of nonrestrictive modifier–a parenthetical–but I’m no linguist … so we will await word from Katharine, who is.

UPDATE: Katharine says it’s nonrestrictive!

It’s a lot of fun having a friend who’s a linguist.

How to score a 790 on SAT verbal…

Re: teaching grammar to raise scores on SAT/ACT language tests, Jean writes:

….I should think there are not many students who can identify a clause. I couldn’t, until I put my two kids through Rod & Staff English, where they tell you all about clauses every year. (I put my kids through R&S because I had never been taught any grammar except nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It seems to have paid off; my 17yo got a 790 on the SAT verbal.)

Jean smoked me out!

I was tempted, in my earlier post, to say that until I started teaching freshman composition a few years ago, I couldn’t identify clauses, either.

But I thought better of it.

Hah!

Funny thing is, when I returned to teaching I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I’d been taught the difference between simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences as a child; I remembered it well. But I had no idea that I’d never actually understood it.

So there I was, staring down students’ mangled sentences, not having much idea what was actually wrong with them, and thinking I knew what a complex sentence was when I didn’t.

That was then.

How to score a 34 on ACT English

A while back, I mentioned my ACT student, the one who was scoring at the 85th percentile on English when we began work and had reached the 98th percentile just one month later.

Not long after she took the June ACT, we had good news: her practice scores held! On English, she scored 34 (out of 36).

From the 85th percentile to the 98th in 1 month.

Her June reading score, on the other hand, wasn’t as high as I think it should be. On practice tests, she was scoring 32; on the real thing, she scored 30 (89th percentile, presumably). I’m hoping she’ll reach 32 in September.

That said, her weakest reading score put her at the 66th percentile, so technically her reading gain was higher than her gain on writing.

Eureka moment

“M” made most of her gains in the second two weeks of our work together.

I’ve become a pretty effective classroom teacher, I think, at least judging by my students’ results on exit exams. But I’ve been teaching the 5-paragraph essay, not ACT/SAT reading and language, and I have a semester to work with my college students, not 4 weeks. So with M., I was feeling my way.

Two weeks in, we were pretty much exactly where we had been on Day One–and this with a highly intelligent, focused, and disciplined student. A lot of teens don’t do test-prep homework, and they can be scattered when it comes to keeping appointments. But M. did all her homework and showed up, and still we weren’t getting anywhere.

I was worried.

Then, pretty much from one day to the next, everything turned around.

On the reading front, I figured out Debbie Stier’s approach, which she developed while tutoring her daughter, and began using it religiously with M. (Debbie had actually explained her technique to me going in, but I hadn’t understood the essential feature.)

That was a game changer. M’s scores on practice sections jumped up and stayed up.

On English, I had a eureka moment: sentence slots!

Sentence slots, clauses, phrases!

I needed to stop teaching commas and start teaching grammar.

That was the breakthrough.

As soon as I began filling M. in on subjects and finite verbs, I discovered that she had no idea what a clause was. She didn’t know what phrases were, either, and had once inserted a comma in between a preposition and its object. (That’s another issue–punctuating-by-pause–that I’ll get to in another post.)

She’s a native speaker; her spoken grammar is perfect.

But nobody uses punctuation when they talk, and to use punctuation properly you have to know where clauses begin and end.

You have to know where phrases and sentence slots begin and end, too.

I’ll close with a terrific paragraph from Ed Vavra’s KISS site:

My interest in the teaching of grammar began in the 1970’s, when I was a graduate assistant at Cornell University. I taught Freshman Composition in the context of Russian literature. . . . My students were having problems with the use of semicolons, and time, and time again, I tried to explain that a semicolon is used to separate two main clauses with contrasting ideas — “He went swimming; she did the dishes.” The lessons never took, and it was not until after a semester was over, and I was discussing the problem with a student from one of my classes that I learned what the problem was. “We can’t,” she told me, “identify clauses.”

Help desk

An item on PSAT 1:

They know it as colony collapse disorder (CCD), this phenomenon will have a detrimental impact on global agriculture if its causes and solutions are not determined.

A) NO CHANGE
B) Known as colony
C) It is known as colony
D) Colony

Choice A is wrong because it’s a comma splice.

Choice B is correct.

Choice C is wrong because it’s a comma splice, too.

Why is Choice D wrong?

I think it’s wrong because “colony” is a noun that lacks a noun “slot” (or function) in the sentence: it’s not a subject; it’s not an object; it’s not a complement. It’s nothing, really. At least, it’s nothing in terms of the sentence.

Is there a different way to see it?

ACT results

Sorry to have been MIA — I’ve begun tutoring the ACT and have been immersed in the test.

It’s been exciting, fun, and really satisfying.

Results for my first student:

Timed practice tests	4/29/2017	5/31/2017
English (75 items)	Missed 12 (Scaled score: 27) 85th percentile	Missed 4 (Scaled: 34) 98th percentile
Reading (40 items) (I used Debbie Stier’s method)	Missed 13 (Scaled score: 23) 66th percentile	Missed 3 (Scaled: 32) 95th percentile

That second set of scores was actually a bit of a letdown because by the end of May, A. was routinely turning in perfect scores taking stand-alone timed sections (not the entire test).

No misses at all.

She took the real test yesterday morning, so now we wait–wait, and start work on math. She’s taking the September ACT, too, so the plan is to get her math score up by then.

I also have to make sure she doesn’t get rusty on English and Reading over the summer.

That brings up a question: in fact, I don’t actually know if it’s possible for her to get rusty over the summer. Once your unconscious learning system has learned something, it doesn’t forget.

I’ve got to find time to get back to Make It Stick and to Dan Willingham’s various articles to figure out how much practice she might (or might not) need. I’m just not sure.

But I’m happy!

Update: just realized I should include my email here since we don’t have a tutoring page up yet: hillisjohnson@gmail.com.