Chapter 6 FIAE

Chapter 6 focuses heavily on how to put together a test, and create the best possible questions to assess your students' understanding. It definitely emphasizes how much work goes into effective test questions, which interested me a lot, as it wasn't really a subject that I had put too much thought into. A great portion was about how to keep students on their games during tests and to kind of keep them interested, which is by changing up the types of questions you're using. They give a lot of really specific advice, but the most important was probably one of the simplest; to be clear. All I could think about were all of the times in high school when I was sitting in a test and could not understand what the teacher wanted from me as an answer. Either the question was too broad or too bizarrely stated. I was once asked the who Angela's siblings were in Frank Mccourt's Angela's Ashes, I wrote down their names and ended up losing two points for not writing which was her brother and which was her sister; which I though was pretty clear. Giving students this kind of frustration is not helpful to the learning environment, and makes them second guess their knowledge.
Making tests less terrible is really important because so many students are just terrified of tests when they really should not be. A teacher's job is not to play word games with students while assessing their understanding, or to try to trick them, and not being clear does this, whether it is intentional or not. This is definitely something that I'll strive to be aware of, as I remember being a student and feeling the pains of test anxiety that sitting down to some teachers' assessments would give me.