Really fussy marking with otherwise good work

[BinkyandFlip]

I'm not sure how to manage this. Ds is in Y4 and is pretty good at school work, not struggling particularly, but his teachers seem to be picking him up on every little tiny thing in his work.

For example we did some comprehension last weekend, together, which wasn't actually comprehension - there was a paragraph about caring for dogs, but the questions were not directly from the text therefore it was more about dog-related general knowledge or common sense I suppose.

Anyway we answered the questions as best we could and he wrote the answers. First off he's being told to do full sentences instead of just answering the question, which is printed alongside anyway, but that's Ok, I understand it.
Then he is being pulled up on the use of 'because', as in '...because dogs need to eat meat...' and asked to find another word instead? As?

There is one question which asks what would happen if you forgot to feed your dog.

He didn't know what was expected and so he wrote 'It would starve to death'. This was met with 'Why?'



Neither ds nor I understands what his teacher wants him to put for this. It seems totally bonkers, very obvious, nothing to do with comprehension and really for a child who has never owned a dog, I'm not sure how he's meant to know where to get a marrow bone from, or why you need to change the water every day.

None of this is explained in the paragraph.

Can anyone help?

[derxa]

Narp You're so right. But now we have 'Inference Training'.

[shebird]

Narp I think part of the issue here is that comprehension as we knew it related specifically to understanding of the written text. Today not all the questions are about the actual text and require students to infer/ guess or use general knowledge to answer the questions. So what is being assessed in a comprehension excersise? Is it reading, writing, vocabulary or all of the above plus general knowledge?

[mrz]

But this is comprehension as we knew it (certainly how I was taught in the dark ages). The questions relate directly to the text but aren't of the straightforward retrieval type.