THE CALIFORNIA LEARNING ASSESSMENT SYSTEM EXAMS: A GROWING FUROR : Test’s Method Gets Students Talking--and Thinking : Education: Unlike most exams, CLAS rules permit sharing of answers and opinions. Despite initial nervousness, some South Gate eighth-graders even call it fun.

The routine at South Gate Middle School was a shambles: longer classes, fewer periods, a sense of dread. On select classroom doors, hot-pink flyers announced the reason: CLAS Test, Do Not Disturb.

Behind one of those doors, 31 eighth-graders tore open the secret envelopes and pulled out the booklets, preparing to put their reading and writing skills to the test in one of the most rigorous standardized exams they have ever seen.

The students in Bungalow 719 are the 1994 graduates of the California Learning Assessment System, year two. Since April, as many as 1 million California students have been hunching over their desks answering questions the likes of which they have not seen before.

About the only remnants of past standardized tests were the No. 2 pencils and the teacher’s instruction to “please clear your desks.”

Kids talked and laughed during one portion of the test. At times they shared their work, even copied from each other. They got to use notes as they wrote an essay. When they finished, most looked invigorated, not bedraggled.

“It was kind of fun. In a way, it was pretty easy,” said Vanessa Garcia, 13. “But you have to think a lot when you do this test. It makes you a little nervous, but at least it’s not boring like other tests.”

On the last day of their reading and writing test, which spanned about eight hours over four days, the buzz in the classroom wasn’t about the essay at hand but about another daunting test later in the day: the physical education final.

“We gotta run the mile today,” said Colber Lopez, 13. “Everyone’s pretty nervous. We have to do our personal best.”

At the sound of the 8:04 a.m. bell, before the test began, teacher Mark Lawrence, a nine-year veteran of eighth-grade English, shut the door and silenced his chattering students, all from the working-class town of South Gate.

Today, he said, the class would work for 45 minutes in groups, discussing readings from the previous day. One student in each group would have to volunteer to be the discussion leader and make sure that everyone contributed and that the discussion stuck to the reading topic.

“It’s important to take notes because you will be able to look at them later,” Lawrence read from the instruction manual.

Once in their groups, the students murmured, yawned and looked uncomfortable and a bit lost over how to proceed. To refresh their memories, they were permitted to refer to the stories they had read.

“What do we do?” asked one boy. “OK, so what do you remember most?” read one girl. “Nothing,” quipped a boy. The group chuckled.

Across the room, the leader in another group introduced a question: “What don’t you understand about the story?” One girl came up with a short answer and everyone wrote it down. A boy copied the sentence from another’s answer booklet. These exchanges are perfectly acceptable under CLAS test rules.

As the students moved through the test, at first they were met with questions asking them to interpret the stories they read--to describe relationships between characters and also give their own feelings about the story.

The goal is not only to test the students’ general understanding of the story they read, but to gauge their critical thinking and ability to connect the passages to their own experiences. It was clear in Bungalow 719 that even understanding a few of the questions was difficult for some students.

Up shot one boy’s hand.

“What are impressions?” he asked Lawrence.

Lawrence said they are thoughts or ideas. Another hand shot up.

“What’s an excerpt?” another student asked.

Out of earshot of his students, Lawrence said other classes have asked the meaning of excerpt. “That’s not a common word for junior highers,” he said. “It’s not our kids’ fault for not knowing that. It’s a fault in the test design.”

Another hand darted up and a boy asked if ice cream “is separate or together as a word?” Lawrence wouldn’t answer that one.

About 20 minutes into the group work, discussions became animated--loud talk, laughter, occasional gestures to amplify a point. One group described what it felt were the important moments in the story, another discussed the relationship between two characters in the reading.

In the final discussion exercise, one group was asked to list some things that lead to conflicts between parents and teen-agers.

“Boyfriends,” said one girl, prompting giggles.

“Do your parents know you have a boyfriend?” another asked.

“Yeah, mine comes to my house,” said a third. “They know him real well.”

Another girl appeared amazed at this revelation.

“My parents would hang up the phone when my boyfriend calls,” she said.

The group leader interrupted the conversation, asking what this had to do with their test.

Then, one girl announced an idea that everyone scribbled down in their booklets: “Parents and kids need to communicate better.”

Lawrence ended the discussions in the 45th minute, stopping students cold in the middle of their now-lively conversations. Most were smiling. After all, they did just get to spend an entire period talking.

The class spent the next 45 minutes putting their pencils to the paper, churning out the final writing exercise. Some instructions called for students to speculate on an issue, others to write an autobiographical statement or solve a problem.

One boy finished in seven minutes, closed his book and put his head down to nap. Most finished in about half an hour. One boy wrote feverishly to the bitter end.

The experience in Bungalow 719 appears to have been a textbook example of how the CLAS test is supposed to work, said Jill Wilson, one of the State Department of Education’s architects of the reading and writing exam.

“If you are going to talk about problems and solutions, it helps if it is in a domain they are familiar with,” Wilson said.

After the exam, many students gave rave reviews.

“It wasn’t boring like other tests,” said Ronny Rivas, 14. “You get to share thoughts and opinions.”

When it came to the essay, the writing came easier than it usually does to 13-year-old Michelle Lorenzana.

“When you work with other people and get all their opinions, you have more ideas to help you write,” she said. “I think I did OK.”