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Comprehension or lack of it!

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 2:14 pm
by CBissel
For KenR and KE Mum and anyone else who may be able to help…

I'm preparing my daughter for the test in 4 weeks and I'm looking at the comprehension element where they need to answer questions on a passage that they read in an earlier session and no longer have access to.

Do you know whether these questions are in a multiple-choice format, or do they have to write down the answers in their own words? The sample paper does not make this clear and contains both question types, but no example comprehension questions. Is it fair to assume they'd be multiple choice because it would be easier to mark? I’m also thinking this way because if they’re own words then surely an element of subjectivity would be introduced that may make marking difficult etc.

This has a big impact, I've found, on performance - if the correct answer is in there somewhere it can act as a trigger - if not, it makes retrieval far more difficult - this suggests, of course, that they'd use the own words format.....

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 8:56 pm
by KE Mum
Hi

I don't think I can answer your question really, but I know that whatever they had to do was answered on the actual question paper. I don't think that they had to write anything, ie sentences to answer specific questions, so presumably the answers would have been multiple choice. You are right in saying that it is probably impractical for them to mark each paper separately as they must have about 6000 papers to mark.

Sorry not to be very helpful!