<p>Xiggi,</p>
<p>You are right. Students should do better and should be able to find the correct interpretation to the problem. However, you miss the basic point of my response.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I tried to show how the wording of the question lead me down an incorrect garden path that I had to recover from. I suggested that this additional garden path may not have been available in other languages (irrespective of the kind of teaching, test prep etc.). Given that (1) I needed to commit extra cognitive resources to recover from the garden path, resources that take away from solving the main problem (2) that a student working in another language may not have needed to employ these additional resources and (3) committing such resources away from the main problem can lead to greater errors, my hypothesis here is that the difference between US and foreign students may be related to such garden pathing and not necessarily to math education itself. Such a hypothesis is easily testable.</p></li>
<li><p>The quip about self-esteem, while humorous, does nothing to address the overall problem. Let’s say that many students did get 52 cm but failed to add the 25. Or let’s say that many students simply did not know how to find the length of ribbon around the box. You would do something very different in the first case than in the second. But note that saying the cause of the problem is ‘too much self esteem’ is too vague and unhelpful to address the problem–it could apply to just about any problem–from not knowing how to add, not knowing how to find the length of ribbon, or not interpreting the question correctly. </p></li>
<li><p>I find it interesting that the following are OK to present as the cause of poor performance and open to scrutiny and criticism:</p></li>
<li><p>school administrators</p></li>
<li><p>teacher certification (and by extension, teachers themselves).</p></li>
<li><p>teacher unions</p></li>
<li><p>current pedagogy</p></li>
<li><p>textbooks</p></li>
<li><p>current educational standards </p></li>
</ol>
<p>But to suggest that the test itself may be problematic is seen as ‘hilarious’ and merely providing an ‘excuse’. </p>
<p>To suggest that the cause of the problem is “the focus on self-esteem” or “the same people who are too busy negotiating higher wages, smaller workdays, or more benefits for teachers and administrators, and, of course, making sure to use their financial muscle to elect candidates who will support the further erosion of education in our country” is no more enlightening as to providing a solution as “the test is written poorly.”</p>
<p>All aspects should be subject to scrutiny, including the test itself.</p>
<p>Why is the test itself so privileged that it can’t come under scrutiny? Isn’t the test created by those same poorly certified union teachers who use rotten textbooks, promote some misguided and faddish pedagogy, focus too much on self esteem and don’t have high enough standards?</p>