The Artless Dodger
-
Oct 16, 2008 Posted by Ned Johnson
Reading comprehension on standardized tests is a clever thing. One of the more tricky aspects of the test writers' design is the need to craft wrong but compelling answer choices. A commonly used method is to his help students lose track of their thoughts. A student has to read a sometimes 100 line passage, parse a potentially convoluted question, consider his answer, and then consider the five different answer choices. That's quite a few mental balls to keep juggling. Appealing answer choices - even those that are wrong - can help a student lose track of his thoughts. One technique that we have often used is to have students write their own answers to the questions first, before considering the answer choices.
In an article from this week's Washington Post, Shankar Vedantam recounts an analogous process among voters. Candidate Sarah Palin's Vice Presindential debate received criticism not because she dodged answers more than Senator Biden but because it was more apparent she dodged the questions posed to her. Her "pivots" were not as seamless as Biden's, or, for that matter, those of Senators McCain and Obama
In short, Vedantam details how politicians can effectively not answer the questions that are posed to them. Listeners, it seems, when listening to an effective politician cannot recall the initial question by the time the politician finally gets to the end of his or her answer. "In a series of particularly relevant experiments, psychologist Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton recently showed that most people are extremely poor at spotting even dramatic discrepancies between questions and answers. They found the failure is especially acute when answers were semantically linked to questions. Audience seemed to notice more dodges when the answers were completely unrelated to the question.
Just as politicians make notes for themselves to bring the discussion back to the original question that their opponents have dodged, so too can students stay focused on the relevant topic by taking notes so that they are not misled by specious answers. Both test-makers and politicians need us to buy what they are selling. If there were only one plausible answer to a question, or one forthright politician among the lot, our decisions would be much easier