The New York Times rode along with 75 Harlem kindergarteners last week on a field trip to the Queens County Farm Museum to gaze at cows and sheep “not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.”
New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.
The Harlem Success Academy has “invented a form of test preparation,” in the Times’ telling. “The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to the rural life and lift their scores.”
Someone here may be doing a teeny bit of overselling. If HSA has taken to heart the connection between their students’ background knowledge and reading comprehension, that’s terrific. Broad general knowledge certainly correlates with reading ability, but the test of a school’s dedication to that proposition is best measured in its commitment to a rich, well-rounded curriculum day after day, not the occasional field trip. Unfortunately, the Times story doesn’t shed any light on the school’s overall approach to building background knowledge apart from its ostensibly novel “field study” idea.
Mind you, I’m thrilled to see the Times point out that “prior knowledge of a subject can significantly improve a child’s performance on tests.” It’s a connection that can’t be made too often. It might have been more helpful however, had they substituted “reading comprehension” for “performance on tests” in that sentence. Creating the impression that kids should see cow or pick a pumpkin because farming might come up on a test years later strikes me as a bit of a stretch (whether it’s on the part of the Times or the school is unclear). Background knowledge and vocabulary move in mysterious ways, creating unexpected and unpredictable connections. At the Early Ed Watch Blog, Lisa Guernsey offers a somewhat more nuanced take:
A child who has explored a pumpkin patch will have a much easier time in the future when he or she comes across paragraphs about vines and tendrils, maturing fruit and harvest time. And it’s not just children’s reading skills, of course, that can improve. Their grasp of science and social studies becomes more sophisticated too.
Indeed, if there’s anything that rankles about the Times account, it’s viewing a field trip through the simple—and simplistic—lens of testing. “I want to do better on homework and tests,” five-year-old Julliana Jimenez tells the paper. At the risk of being retrograde, it’s a bit dispiriting to hear a kindergartener expressing any concern at all about tests, which don’t start until 3rd grade in New York. One wonders where she picked it up. Build broad general knowledge in children. That will lead to broad language competence. Let the testing take care of itself.
I wonder if the reporter made up the Kindergartener’s quote.
If you ask most of the 5 year olds of my acquaintance why they’d like to visit a farm it’s usually
-to see animals
-to see baby animals
-to see tractors and big machines
-to see animals poop. (This is a HUGE hit with the kids….)
-to jump on hay bales
etc.
etc.
Maybe the school didn’t do enough to prepare the kids for the trip? If the kids had any concept of the fun and mayhem available on a farm, test-prep would be the very LEAST of their desires……..
I fault the Times’ telling of the story. For a more compelling story on a similar theme, have a look at the story of George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, AL–http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/interview-alabama-principal-terri-tomlinson. George Hall’s educators take their overwhelmingly low-income students on frequent field trips to give them a strong foundation in knowledge and vocabulary.
The faculty carefully plans the trips by explicitly tying them to standards and critical vocabulary. They then have students write about the trips to demonstrate their mastery of relevant vocabulary and knowledge. The schools assessment results are impressive, to say the least.
My guess is that the school prepared the kids too much for they trip — or at least for the talking to reporters part of it.
I’d like to have a better idea whether this is a test-prep obsessed school justifying a field trip through their particular lens, or a school that actually seems a well-rounded education as an end in itself. My impression was the former — and though a test-prep obsessed school with a few field trips is better than a test-prep obsessed school without them, it’s still depressing.
I suspect it’s teachers trying to justify an educational field trip in the only language that seems compelling to administrators these days.
Especially at the ES level, I think most field trips are a waste of time. In order to be significant learning experiences, field trips need to be preceeded by background instruction and contain specific instruction on-site regarding what they are seeing and what it means, followed by suitable post-trip instruction. Left to themselves – as usual in my experiences as student and parent chaperone – kids will learn almost nothing. In the same time period, there could have been far more learning in the classroom, especially with the whole world of videos available.
It is not the going; it is the doing. Everyone needs to get away from the desk and experience in real time not virtual. A plastic pumpkin can be punted quite a few yards by a five year old. A real pumpkin can barely be lifted by that same individual. You will not get that experience on a video. We HomeEducate and the biggest and most expensive subject we have is to go and see and do it. Most people around my little world know me and the kids and will wonder over and see what we are learning. They may even give us a few pointers. As the kids are older we are broadening our trips and what we learn.
You just can’t get everything from a book or from the great programs on the History Channel with out some context. That context of time and space and dimension comes from your eyes, ears, nose, touch, and smell. Truly, it changes lives and broadens the scope of your existence.