Why is Critical Thinking Important?
As many of you already know, I have been teaching for almost 10 years. Every year I am tasked with getting students to pass the state assessment in Biology. My first year of state testing, which was almost 8 years ago, I had a 50% passing rate. I had no idea what to think about my scores. I pondered, “what did I do wrong”? Could my scores just reflect the environment I taught? I taught in an inner city school with very little resources in terms of science equipment. Maybe I didn’t go over all the standards that were to be covered on the state assessment. I had excuse after excuse. This is where I learned one of my biggest mistakes in teaching. I focused too much time and energy on the students that failed and not on the ones that passed. Now through all the teaching educator training and programs, they tend to teach you to focus on bringing the students up that struggle. This is a fair point, however had I focused on the students that passed the state assessment with proficiency or higher I would have learned a very value lesson much earlier in my teaching career.
"This is where I learned one of my biggest mistakes in teaching. I focused too much time and energy on the students that failed and not on the ones that passed. "
My third year teaching, the state results came back, and my test scores were at a 60% passing rate. It was an improvement in comparison to my first year of teaching, however there was a glaring issue with the test scores. This is where I learned my most valuable lesson in terms of teaching, and not just teaching science. For the purpose of confidentiality, I will refer to students as either student A or student B. With that being said, student A failed the state assessment with a 60%. Here is a little background information on student A. Student A was a hard working student and had perfect attendance. Student A came into class ready to learn and was an active participant. Though student A struggled on various test throughout the school year, I was pretty confident that student A would get a 70% or higher on the state assessment. Now student B was nothing like student A. Student B rarely paid attention in class. Student B would spend most of the class time on social media even after being redirected. Student B would get 60% on classroom assessment without studying or paying attention in class. When we had our state assessment data meeting, I told the department chair that student B was more than likely going to fail the state assessment because of their lack of focus in class, poor attendance, and nonexistent study habits. Student B received a 93% on the state assessment.
My first thought was that student B cheated, however they had the highest score in the class. After giving the students back their results, I told student A and student B to stay behind. I asked student B to wait outside of the class while I talked to student A. I asked student A what happened and student A replied, “none of the stuff you covered was on the exam”, “the test was extremely hard because I didn’t know the material”. I was shocked. I know I covered the state standards completely that year. I told student A thanks for your feedback and dismissed them from class. I then told student B to come into the room. I asked student B how they did so well on the assessment. Student B replied, “because it was easy”. I was puzzled so I told student B to explain. Student B said, “those questions were common sense… all you had to do was read the question.” That is when a light bulb went off in my head. I went back into the school’s data software and pulled up the test results of all my students from not only this school year, but every single state assessment that they have every taken. I could not believe what I was seeing. The fact that the information was there this entire time was what really made me upset. This is what I discovered. Students that had a Lexile reading score of 1000 or higher passed the science milestone REGARDLESS of the amount of time they spent in the classroom.