Student Misconception Series – English (Part 2)

Do your Student Learn or Mug up ?

Students of all ages seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to responding to any

situation or performing any task.

As teachers, most of us go back home thinking that our students have understood every

concept that we teach them. It is only when we test them that we find that some concepts have

not been understood as clearly as they should have been.

It is this desire to understand student thinking that prompted us to examine ASSET questions of

the past rounds, in Maths, examining the most common wrong answers to understand what

could have made students select the options they did.

Reading For Understanding – VocabularyClass 4

1. Why was the question asked?

Familiar words in a sentence or paragraph usually provide clues to help us figure out the meaning of any unknown words, without having to look them up in a dictionary. The clue may appear within the same sentence as the word to which it refers, or it may be in a preceding or subsequent sentence. Since most of our vocabulary is gained through reading, it is important that students develop the skill to recognize these context clues. This question assesses students’ ability to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words based on clues within the passage.

2. What did students answer?

39% of 1,109 students chose the correct answer, Option C, ‘container’ while 31% chose Option A. ‘flower’, a common wrong answer.Possible reason for choosing A: A majority of the students seem to have selected this option simply because of the visual in the passage, a plant. The word closest to a plant is ‘flower’. The pitchers in the visual look like flowers.Possible reason for choosing B: Students selecting this option probably thought that the word ‘spikes’ in this line, ‘The spikes inside the pitcher also prevent their escape.’, may be thorn like structures that prevent anything entering it, from leaving it easily. They seem to have missed out that the question is asking them about the pitcher and not about what is inside the pitcher.Possible reason for choosing D: Students selecting this option may have picked it as a random guess, considering the small percentage of students who chose this option.

3. Learnings

It is clear from the passage that students are not reading the passage again to look for

clues to the unfamiliar word, but prefer to select options based on memory alone, or

are distracted by the visual in the passage. If they had read the passage again, they

would have noticed words like: jugs, containing, lid, rim etc. which are clear clues to the

meaning of the word ‘pitcher’. The word ‘jugs’ is a synonym for the word ‘pitcher’

because of the presence of the word ‘or’ in between them. (Its leaves are shaped like

jugs or pitchers, some of which are large enough to capture a rat.)

Students who got this right have been able to arrive at this meaning as they connected

the different words to each other in the process of their reading the passage again.

4. How do we handle this?

Since students seem to be dependent on a dictionary to understand the meanings of words, they should be taught how to arrive at the meaning of the word on their own. Here is one method:How to Use Context Clues – Tell the students to:• Locate the unfamiliar word.• Write the word down in the notebook.• Write down the paragraph or page number.• Read before and after the word (read around the word).• Write down words that help you find the meaning of the word (context clues).• Write down what you think the word means (make a prediction).• Check to make sure that your prediction makes sense (reread to confirm).