Asking the right questions

I have a problem when professors and teachers say things like, "My students are so dumb! They all got this question wrong!" For me, that means a mistake with the question. When all/most of my students make the same error in the same place/way, that means I fucked up. I don't blame students for my mistakes.

Earlier in the semester I asked my students an online quiz question and the answers were wildly wrong. Here is the question.

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Week 2 - Reading Quiz - Post-Civil War South 

Question 9 

 

The following image shows the Barrow Plantation, located in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, in 1860 and later in 1881. The plantation's residents stayed mainly the same across this time period, but their living arrangements changed. Explain how the living patterns appear to have changed according to the map and how this new arrangement demonstrates the shift from slavery to sharecropping/tenant farming across this time period?

 

Barrow Plantation, Oglethorpe County, Georgia

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In addition, the textbook (which the students were assigned to read) contained the exact same image, with an accompanying reading passage about how many former slaves became poor tenant farmers on the same or very nearby plots of land in the post-Civil War South, as well as a discussion of the horrible system of debt that emerged as farmers were forced to pay for land, equipment, supplies, and a host other expenses by white landowners, who were often former masters.

I assumed that students would use the passages in the book to help answer the question. I also assumed that students would be able to infer information from the pictures and labels that was not explicit. Essentially, I hoped students would see from the reading and the images that although the living quarters changed, the owner of the land did not change. I also hoped that would mention from the picture and book, that the landowners, who were often former masters, charged exorbitant rents, equipment fees, and required tenants to give back half their harvests. As a result, share-cropping and tenant-farming perpetuated poverty and economic inequality in the post-war South, and prevented economic advancement.

A fraction answered correctly using information from the book and/or previous knowledge. But the majority of students wrote that free blacks got to own their own land and start earning money to help them escape the inequality of slavery. They simply looked at the two pictures and saw the living arrangement change from slave quarters to scattered plots of land. They assumed the slaves had bought the land and were making a profit.

At first I was annoyed as I gave student after student 5/10 on the question. After about ten wrong responses, though, a red flag went up in my mind. Why were so many students getting it wrong? I went back and reread the question and then I realized, that was really all I had asked them to do in the question. I had hoped they would read the book and incorporate that information. I had hoped they would they the owner of the plantation remained the same. I had hoped they would consider the word "tenant" and know that it means renter.  But I didn't tell them to do any of those things. Instead, they read the information I gave in the question, looked at the two living arrangements, and gave the obvious answer. Not the correct historic answer. Not based on the information in the book. But it was correct based on the information given.

It is moments like this that I am frustrated by how literal and lazy my students can be at times.  But I held myself partially to blame. From this point forward, I started questions like this with the phrase, "Based on information in your reading...." as well as providing more essential content in the question. The questions have improved and the answers have improved. Lesson learned for me.