I was performing a reading comprehension assessment with a fifth-grade student recently when she called my attention to something confusing in the test passage she was reading: "Why was the main character in so many movies?", she asked. I, of course, gently reminded her that I could not answer questions during an assessment, but that we could chat about it later.
After the assessments were done, I asked her to clarify her earlier question.
"Well," she said, "it said the main character 'appeared in many home movies'. Why was he in all those movies about houses?" And it struck me that most children today don't refer to all those videos mom and dad have of them on their phones as "home movies". The term is a relic of the days when a novel gadget, the handheld camcorder, first hit the market for consumer use. We used the term "home" to distinguish the films we made ourselves on these clunky machines from "real" movies, and so calling them "home movies" was a necessary application of language to avoid confusion. Now that taking videos of ourselves on our phones is so common, there is no need to make the distinction, as the implication is enough.
It was a fun aside to talk about the evolution of language with this student, but the problem was, she didn't fully understand the passage! Having a good vocabulary is part of assessing reading comprehension, but when the passage contains outdated terms, is that a fair expectation? Test developers must be sure to screen their assessment materials for instances like this, because using outdated language can skew the results of assessments, and that is both unfair to children, and an impediment for assessors who want to collect data that accurately reflects a child's abilities.
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