This test question isn't testing that.
> What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices.
It sure doesn't. It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text. That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of microscopes.
> Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.
It sure isn't. Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.
As to the fact that the question doesn’t test internal modelling, of course it does. If you made it a question about something nobody has ever seen before, then it wouldn’t test knowledge of microscopes. But it does ask about microscopes.
Perhaps, in aggregate, the test covers enough subject areas that the students tested will be exposed to a roughly equal mix of things they have experience with and things they don’t. But as I noted elsewhere, the fact that it’s possible to answer this question from the text alone in no way changes the fact that it’s easier to answer the question with prior experience. And from that, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether this is a good question.
But I think the testers aren't total morons, and know that such a question is biased towards children with proper (privileged) backgrounds where microscopes and the respective training are commonplace. They'll be faster at answering the question and not feel ignorant — crucial advantages on tests.
(The testers may not even like this facet of their jobs, like ad industry developers who use ad-blockers, but it sure beats unemployment.)
And the whole question smacks of "scientism", where tools are confused with science. You never see a question like, "Scientists have believed something for 200 years. Is it necessarily true?"
And therein lies a great fallacy which is still widely believed in our post-Enlightenment world. But the map is not the terrain. A mental model cannot be completely represented with words or pictures, or anything. Words and pictures, even good ones chosen for pedagogical value, are only pale projections of a complex thing onto a flat surface.
>Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.
Without qualification, this statement is strictly false. There may be certain kinds of text that can be comprehended with no prior knowledge of the subject if you assume a certain baseline of internalized knowledge. There are many old parlor games (which have sadly gone out of style) which rely on hacking this qualification. For example, one of them requires that one person follow the instructions of another. One person tries to describe how to draw a particular geometric figure. The person doing the drawing must follow the instruction, but they also are free (in fact encouraged) to ignore the intention of the instruction. It's a game that puts the difference between words and reality up-front and center.
The rest of the alternatives are "plausible guesses" which you might think are reasonable if you don't remember the point above. So what they're REALLY testing is if you read the text carefully enough to remember that line or not.
Actually having knowledge of microscopes are probably a bad thing on this particular question since you're likely to skip over the boring warning part, like I did when I quickly read the question just now.
In this case the object of the narrative is a microscope. And as people read through the text they aren't memorizing sentences or facts they are filling out the model, or character, of the microscope. But people who already have an accurate model of a microscope from personal experience will have an easier job doing so. It's similar to the way standardized tests can be racially biased. If I put forth a "story problem" about the rules of football, being familiar with those rules already gives one an advantage.
That's the writer's complaint. In order for this question to be testing reading comprehension rather than laboratory experience, it must be assumed that the test taker has not used a microscope. Otherwise, they could answer the question without even looking at the text.
This reminds me of people who think the manpages are a sufficient resource to completely understand the unix cli environment.
The microscope lens should initially be placed close to the glass slide: C. To avoid breaking the glass slide when adjusting the focus.
And I think what the author is saying is that we should spend more time giving kids microscopes and testing what they see with them.
TANGENT ABOUT BIKE SHED COLOURS:
Questions like this remind me of questions about OOP. First the preamble: “Organize objects into classes to create a hierarchy of abstract types....” Then a question: “Classes are used to (a) provide a constructor for objects, (b) to promote reuse of behaviour, (c) to model a type hierarchy, (d) to facilitate modular software development.”
You ask someone to build a model in their head, and then the most successful strategy for answering the question is to turn the model off and use brute force to scan the exact words of the question, because the more knowledge you have of the domain, the less likely you are to answer the question correctly from your experience.
Based on my life experience so far; this is one of the most important skills to learn.
What I’m saying is that it is much easier to answer the question if you have hands-on experience.
Of course; but that isn't the point of the test.
And I think what the author is saying is that we should spend more time giving kids microscopes and testing what they see with them.
Yes, but again this test is not about that. And if the author is arguing that practical experience should entirely supplant this sort of critical thinking then I entirely disagree.
Critical thinking is taught from a young age, in very subtle ways. The ability to approach a topic you know nothing about, dissemble it, and answer a question (either posed to you, or by you) is fundamental to all of our lives.
My feeling looking at this is that if I wanted kids to get the highest possible score, I’d teach them how to take tests rather than buy them a bunch of tools and have them figure out how to use the tools from the instruction manuals (reading, critical thinking, problem solving). Whereas if I wanted them to learn critical thinking, we’d be solving problems with tools.
But I accept that this is a very large topic, it’s not like this is a one-question test, and students are exposed to a variety of stimuli. Also, there is always the democracy argument: This might be the worst test ever devised, except for all of the others we’ve tried. Perhaps this is the “least worst” way to test and teach given other factors in play.
'dissemble' means "to put on a false appearance : conceal facts, intentions, or feelings under some pretense" according to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissemble.
The question is completely invalidated by knowledge of the domain. If anything, they should have constructed an artificial device that would guarantee the student didn't have domain knowledge that would allow them to bypass the necessary critical thinking:
To avoid smaggling the fizdoodle, make sure you begin with the smunderson in the upright position.
Q: Why should the smunderson start in the upright position?
A: To avoid smaggling the fizdoodle.
edit: s/being/begin/
Incidentally that statement only sense if you know which direction to turn the focus knob, and you recognize the fact that the hypothetical microscope is capable of crushing the specimen. I had one when I was a kid that was incapable of doing so.
I answered the question correctly, but it only due to my cynicism, not my reading comprehension.
Utterly incomprehensible!
The fact that the journalist is that dense is mostly a symptom of "oh hey I've found an argument against standardized testing to fit my preexisting conceptions of the matter! Screw reading it, it looks complicated, I'll just use it to justify things." Same basic problem.
s/microscope/computer and you have the cause of an average Helpdesk's stress...
ed. Downvotes? Really? Nobody has ever struggled with a problem which could be solved if the help-ee has bothered to read the text on their screen?
On the other hand, when she doesn't call me for help, she ends up printing off a picture from a webpage and scanning it back in to get it into a power point presentation. That's better than giving up on the problem, I guess.
From my understanding of cognitive science, the question asked is deeply flawed if you want to test comprehension without testing knowledge of microscopes.
One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model in your head of what is being described. You then answer questions about the model in your head. Experience with microscopes or similar devices is incredibly valuable to building such a model in your head and answering questions about it. This was one of the “big problems” in first generation AI: to answer questions, a computer must be able to construct models, and to construct models, a computer needs a huge amount of real-world experience.
What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices. Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.
Now, there may be a good reason why an entire test full of a variety of such questions is effective for accomplishing whatever the school board wants accomplished—getting funding, I imagine—but I stop well short of saying the author’s complaint is “daft.” I think there are good reasons to be curious about the biases inherent in this question, and about where schools end up if they build their entire approach to teaching around scoring well on questions like this.