Those who do not study the history of the history exams...

Via LanguageLog, a really nice discussion of the recent NAEP history test results, in which an education professor explains why we shouldn't take all that seriously the reports that American students know so little about history. For instance:

An item is “bad” if almost everyone gets it right. So, if during the piloting testing of NAEP, it is determined that most twelfth-graders can identify “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Rosa Parks, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, slavery as a main cause of the Civil War, the purpose of Auschwitz, and Harriet Tubman, these items are all thrown out because they fail to “discriminate” among students.

You can also go right to the website for the exam, which lets you look over questions from the exam, and also gives some sample answers in the "complete/partial/inappropriate" categories for short answer questions. (Another article from the History News Network discusses some answers the examiners consider "wrong". The second half of the article veers into other territory, but the first half is well worth reading.)

NAEP revisited: the math exam

Apologies for two closely-related posts in quick succession, but: I've decided to skim over some of the math questions, since that's a field where I have more expertise than in history. One of the first questions I looked at was the following, a "hard" question from the 2009 12th-grade test (block M2, Question #7):

x	y
-2	3
-1	0
0	-1
1	0
2	3
3	8

The table above shows all the ordered pairs (x,y) that define a relation between the variables x and y. Is y a function of x? Give a reason for your answer.

The NAEP's answer: ( Take a moment to formulate an answer before looking, if you're so inclined )