“Read the question carefully!”

Recently, I came across this image shared on social media:

I read that and thought it must be one of those mind-blowing facts that make us appreciate scale. It wasn’t until I saw someone else say it took them far too long to work this out that I finally got it.

I hadn’t read or processed the statement properly.

Year after year, I chide my students for not reading the question carefully when reviewing assessments.

How embarrasing then that I don’t follow my own advice.

Now I could argue that I wasn’t answering an exam question or that I only looked at the image in passing and so I wasn’t fully attending to it. But when I think about it, I know I have done this when attempting exam questions or filling in forms or reading the instructions to build a toy for my kids. The latter being an extreme pressure situation akin to exams as my kids eagerly await said toy and grow increasingly impatient as each second ticks by.

So, clearly it isn’t enough to say ‘read the question carefully’ if it isn’t so easy to do this myself and my students apparently fail to do so time and time again.

What can we do about this if it seems so inevitable?

Why are students not reading the question carefully?

I think students fail to read a question carefully because they are:

• anxious about the assessment
• in a rush to complete the assessment
• struggling to comprehend the question (due to tricky wording, tier 2 vocabulary or a low reading age)
• struggling to hold all the parts of the question in their memories
• being too efficient

The last one only dawned on me when I misread the statement on the aforementioned image of the glass of water. Maybe because we are trying to be efficient, our brains are picking out certain words and making meaning but because we haven’t taken our time with it, we misinterpret the information. I don’t know if this is backed by actual evidence but I can certainly think of other instances when I have read words quickly, made meaning and found that I got it completely wrong.

How can we help our students?

With the first three reasons (anxiety, rush and lack of comprehension), the main thing we can do to help our students is to provide lots of practice of exam-style questions and conditions within a safe environment. Students become familiar with the wording, format and conditions, and actual assessments don’t feel as overwhelming or confusing.

To help students with their working memory, the best advice I have seen was proposed by Adam Boxer. He says we should flip the advice given to students so they read their answer and check the question.

But what about efficiency? I think in terms of misinterpreting a question, it is efficiency in terms of reading rather than comprehension that potentially causes an issue.

Students can help themselves with efficient comprehension (and their working memory) by doing something that many of us do automatically.

Let’s look at this exam question:

The entire question is worth 5 marks in total. That is a lot of reading required for what should take about 5 minutes to read, comprehend and answer.

For some of our students, this question probably hits all of our reasons for not reading a question carefully!

I have started modelling exam questions such as this one by decoding different segments as follows:

The level of decoding required depends on the class in front of me. For instance, some classes are very familiar with what the words ‘apparatus’ and ‘digestion’ refer to but for others it is important to activate the right schemas instead of allowing students to make their own meaning from these words.

Having some of the key facts written down in front of them following annotating means (a) students don’t have to hold all this information in their working memories, and (b) the thinking has already happened before reaching the actual question.

In this case, as students have already written ‘fatty acids’ while annonating the question earlier, they will quickly know the answer to this question. Otherwise, the instinct of quite a few students is to write that ‘bile’ or ‘lactic acid’ caused the drop in pH (at least that is what my students have historically written in response to this question!).

For some students, this type of schema activation happens in their heads but by explicitly modelling this in writing we are helping make these exam questions seem less overwhelming and more familiar. The time we invest in helping our students identify relevant core knowledge means they can do this for themselves and become efficient with decoding a question rather than simply reading it quickly.

If I had done this exact thing with the ‘mind-blowing’ fact linked to the glass of water, I would’ve been able to smile smugly at not getting fooled. Instead, I grimaced and wrote this blog.