Susan Ohanian has allowed us to print a brief review of Children and Reading Tests, a book by Clifford Hill and Eric Larson. Ohanian is a nationally known activist parent who writes extensively and operates a popular website at http://www.susanohanian.org/.
Read Children and Reading Tests by Clifford Hill and Eric Larson
Even if you already know that reading test questions aren’t fair, reasonable, non-biased, and an accurate assessment of children’s reading ability, you should read this book. It will knock your socks off.
Using methods of discourse analysis, the authors examine not only representative material from reading tests but also children’s responses to that material. In short, they talk to children about why they chose the answers they did, and suddenly the reader is made aware of how biased toward an adult perspective the reading tests are. We see how convincing children’s “wrong” answers are.
The book is particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children’s understanding of what they read.
Besides all this, the authors’ style is straightforward and easy going. It is altogether a fascinating book.
The authors make the point that this is rarely written about because researchers can’t get permission to print tests. They were able to use a test that had been mothballed–and so they don’t just describe the scenario, they print the test passage & questions and then give children’s responses. Passages that looked OK to me suddenly were loaded with “culture” when I read children’s responses. Something so seemingly simple as “home.”
I can’t think of any book I recommend as highly as this one.
Susan Ohanian
