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A Math Test That's Rotten To the Common Core
theodp writes " The Common Core State Standards Initiative," explains the project's website, ""is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt." Who could argue with such an effort? Not Bill Gates, who ponied up $150 million to help git-r-done. But the devil's in the details, notes Washington Post education reporter Valerie Strauss, who offers up a ridiculous Common Core math test for first graders as Exhibit A, which also helps to explain why the initiative is facing waning support. Explaining her frustration with the intended-for-5-and-6-year-olds test from Gates Foundation partner Pearson Education, Principal Carol Burris explains, "Take a look at question No. 1, which shows students five pennies, under which it says 'part I know,' and then a full coffee cup labeled with a '6' and, under it, the word, 'Whole.' Students are asked to find 'the missing part' from a list of four numbers. My assistant principal for mathematics was not sure what the question was asking. How could pennies be a part of a cup?" The 6-year-old first-grader who took the test didn't get it either, and took home a 45% math grade to her parents. And so the I'm-bad-at-math game begins!"
Question 1: You see 5 pennies, the total in the cup is 6, so the missing part is 1 (penny). How hard can that possibly be?
The test was written by a non-native speaker of English, right?
The answer is D.
But it's REALLY bad.
When Monty asks if you want to switch doors, always say 'yes'. There's a 2/3 chance you'll win that way.
Yeah, why pennies, and why a cup? I'm guessing the answer is D, 1, based on the number on the side of the cup, but that's a guess.
And what about #12? What the heck is a "subtraction sentence"? Why are there no subtractions in the answers?
Because the pennies add up to 5, and to be whole it should be 6? Or is whole milk 6% fat and 6/100 = .06 * 5 pennies = .30, or in other words 30%, which is why the genius kid picked B?
Or is it message about the deflation of the value of the dollar in international markets and the price of milk?
Here's a novel idea. Instead of bitching about it, fix it. You find two poorly written questions on a test and its some kind of travesty? Look at the bright side....kids are going to have to learn to deal with people that can't express themselves, or ask stupid questions, eventually.
Americans are so bad at maths when they're really testing English comprehension.
We know what works in education, but we apparently are unable or unwilling to do it. Take a look at some of the tests from a hundred years ago and try your luck at passing them, or read reports written by sixth graders in 1900. Impressive, huh?
We need better discipline in schools and less political correctness. Zero-tolerance should be replaced with common sense and mature judgement. Teachers who can't teach (even if they know their subject backwards and forwards) should be fired. It should be possible for anyone with the proper qualifications to teach whether they have a "teaching certificate" or not; imagine a person retiring from IBM teaching a computer class or a retiree from the financial field teaching economics.
There's no need to experiment with our children using untested methods that may or may not work. We know how to do this. It ain't rocket surgery, for Christ's sake.
Wouldn't the NSA design a system where they already knew how the student would do by observing classroom behavior? This kind of responsive ("predictive") system was exactly the sort of thing that researchers wanted to develop when I was at EDM 2013 in July, by the way.
This is a test for 5 year olds just joining school FFS
I don't see the Common Core standards as the problem, this is just a poorly written test made by people who were not the authors of Common Core. Unless I misunderstand, Common Core simply defines what skills a student should be proficient at by the end of school years. It doesn't define these test questions, Pearson Education did.
Well, there is clearly something wrong with your brain.
you took 45% and didn't compare it to any other statistical metrics
An earlier edition of the "Social Studies Extended Response" stated the following (emphasis mine):
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You don't understand! Until everychild gets 100% in every test they might think they are faillures and not precious little snow flakes.
I love being labeled a right-wing nutjob when I point out that common core is flawed to the core. It was fine when it was a concensus standard, but every self-declared expert came out of the woodwork when it became effectively a federal mandate.
What is it with the link in the last line of theodp submissions?
http://www.mathematicallyminded.com/downloads/Missing%20Part%20Cards%20-%20I%20Wish%20I%20Had.pdf
Today's society is mainly intellectual,
You are literally a retard.
Exactly, if nearly every child gets nearly 100% on every test, then these tests are useless. You test to measure both ability and familiarity with the material. Otherwise why not just assign grades solely based on attendance?
It's a system full of good intentions, but the people that come up with the questions appear to be gearing things toward a certain way of thinking. I'm all about the system, it is designed to show the children how they think, and how they work out problems naturally, in their mind's eye as it were.
One problem that I have had with it in the past is that the way the questions allow for assumptions. For instance, I'm from Alabama. In Alabama it's generally hot and humid. When we take our kids to the park, they generally are wearing sandals or flip-flops. Any time they're playing in the sand, they're going to be bare-footed, or at the most, sandals/flip-flops. They give the kids a story to read about a kid that goes to the park. The story is basically this:
Story title: 'A day at the park' Timmy goes to the park. He plays in the park. He plays in the sand. It starts to rain, so Timmy has to leave. Timmy goes home and puts on dry socks. Timmy then takes a nap. When Timmy wakes up, the sun is out. He goes back to the park. Timmy likes the sun. Timmy smiles.
Then the questions that they ask are something like this:
1) What's another good title for this story? a) The sun b) Timmy goes to the park c) Rain and sun d) Timmy takes a nap
2) Why did Timmy put on dry socks? a) Because Timmy was home b) Because his socks were wet c) Because he was sleepy d) Because Timmy wanted to go back to the park
So question #1 is asking for an opinion, and question #2 is asking about something that's not mentioned in the story. After my kid missed both questions, I asked the teacher why, and her answer was that the questions are introducing higher learning. Higher learning? An opinion is higher learning? Asking questions that are full of assumptions not mentioned in the story, is higher learning?
So in that way it needs to be improved upon. But for math, they allow the kids to express the algorithm in any way, and as long as they get the answer correct, and the algorithm that they use is logical, then they're credited with learning. And I think that's way better than, "Here is an algorithm, learn it, and use it." Because if you don't understand how that algorithm came to be, you will not be able to use it in real life. Whereas if you came up with the algorithm yourself, you cannot explain how or why you came up with it, but you understand how to use your brain in the real world.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The question is unclear and ambiguous, but the smarter test takers will figure out what they are probably asking. Somehow I don't think that was the original intent of the funders of this project.
... that maths concepts are being taught as if maths was similar to English Language. I suspect that was felt to be easier, or 'more inclusive' by the bureaucrats.
Unfortunately, maths is a very precise set of codes, and English (in common with most other cultural languages) is full of nuance and ambiguity. 5-6 year olds are just starting to come to grips with language, and I'm not sure that pretending that a mathematical equation is the same thing as a sentence is going to help them.
Besides, if it is, how do you do a metaphor in maths?
I took the whole test she posted and got a perfect score :-D yay! I sort of see where question #1 makes no sense but I get what they were trying to get at. A 6 cent cup of coffee perhaps? I dunno. Anyway, I'm a former math and programming tutor at my college and am now CIO and head software engineer at my company. That may have skewed the results a bit, lol.
It's not quite as bizarre as Q1, but the rest of the test isn't so great. Still looks like the kid failed legitimately, the test only contributed.
Question 2 asks about jars and shows a picture depicting cubes, which seems odd, but Q3 implies they've been taught some technique involving cubes, so that might be OK.
Assuming the cube thing has been taught Q3 is fine (although "number sentence" is odd; I imagine parents would absolutely freak if someone tried to teach little Greta and Johnny the word "equation")
Q4 is fine; sorry kid, you got that wrong legitimately
Q5 demonstrates the problem of trying to teach with simplified terminology. The kid was given that the total was 9 and a picture of 4 pennies. When asked for "part I know" the kid gave 9, which is literally true in one sense, but not what they're looking for.
Q6 and Q7 are fine. (but why are they using circular counters instead of cubes as they did before?)
Q8 and Q9 are fine.
Q10 and 11 are fine, but why are they under the topic of "Additions"? It's subtraction.
Q12 is broken. Elsewhere in the test they imply that a "subtraction sentence" is an equation with a subtraction operator. Searching the web confirms this. There's no subtraction operator there. Kudos to the kid for figuring out what they meant.
Someone at Pearson came up with a bad question.
They meant for that question to coincide with the standards which say subtraction should be taught. How the heck do you leap from "Pearson has some bad questions" to "curriculum standards are bad"? Common Core may be bad, it may be good, TFA gives no reason to believe either. They only show that Pearson's implementation has some errors.
We teach firefighting, construction safety, and other topics that have specific codes and standards students need to learn. When we realize we have a bad question we don't say "construction codes are bad and students shouldn't be expected to learn them", we say "this question is bad and we should rewrite it so it better gauges the student's understanding".
There are a couple of statistical calculations test makers can use to find and fix bad questions. It doesn't appear that Pearson used those (yet). If they run the calculation, they'll see which questions are bad and can fix or remove them.
Obviously if fewer than half of students get a question correct, it's probably a bad question. There are other calculations which are similar but more advanced. Look at a properly designed quiz covering the same subject, one with well vetted questions, and I bet it looks a lot better. Questions like "Imagine you had four cookies and gave one to your sister. How many would you have left?" also meet the common core standards, and that's probably a good question for a certain grade level.
So the test should have been: 1 + 5 = ?
a. 7
b. 8
c. 6
d. 42
Bill Gates thinks we need more H1b's, so why not foist a rigged math test on American students?
And what about #12? What the heck is a "subtraction sentence"? Why are there no subtractions in the answers?
It seems that since Math is described as "universal language", these clowns have "CSI'ed" this concept and talk about equations as sentences. Now, you if you want to confuse the heck out of a 5 year old, this is exactly how you'd present the situation. You might as well start throwing theorems and axioms around while you are at it!
The point of math is logical thinking. These tests show very little of it. There are some hints, but basically instead of writing "subtraction sentences" or "find numerical sentence that is true", how about simple, logical questions??
Bob has 5 apples. Bob gives 3 of his apples with Alice. How many apples are there?
Bob has 5 apples. Bob eats 2 apples and loses 1. How many apples does he have left?
Bob has 5 apples. He gives 3 applies to Mary. Mary gives 1 apple to Johnny. How many apples does Mary have?
Why would I need to start describing this as "subtraction sentences"? That ruins the entire point - it sets up the problem! It is suppose to be about logic, and they missed the point.
Then ask the question 5+1=? or 5+?=6.
There are even visual ways to frame the question that actually ask the question.
What is presented there is crap. Might as well ask 5 apples + ? = 6 oranges, and even that would make more sense than that question.
The "part I know" stuff shows up later in the test (Question 5) in a much clearer context. It looks to me as if this is a phrasing that schools are expected to teach. That said, the test doesn't seem to me to be written at a first grade level
They should just give the kid the math problem and drop the pictures. They could always teach children to draw out pictures if it helps them. This is just silly, it's like someone is intentionally making useless questions so this project fails.
Sure, but they chose to make it a bit harder. So what? The article did no demonstrate that it was unreasonably difficult, just whined that some kid failed it (probably author's).
I disagree with the premise that just because the question is difficult, it is bad question and should be removed.
I've worked on programming games of chance for various states and governments, and learned that's there's a lot of problems communicating odds/ratios/differences in the ways this test is laying things out, especially for wide audiences that will validly complain about the terms used.
While they're not always fully ambiguous, you're just going to get a large percentage of test-takers answering incorrectly for things they legitimately know, just because they were thinking 'wrong' about how the information was present at that moment. Now, while this does a good job of showing where real-life problems can mislead people - it does a poor job of testing the actual skills being taught, as it's testing too many distinct things in each question to be meaningful in measuring math alone.
In order to have these kinds of questions be meaningful, you'd have to ask several variants over 100's of questions to filter understanding of each aspect of the questions - and you couldn't do that in one sitting either - which is why these are bad questions for a test of math.
If you wanted to test understanding of language context, use a question just for that - a 'what is the best sentence to describe..', then you don't have to have it as part of every question, and can even use previous questions to establish a context.
What this seems designed to do, is provide poor test results for people who haven't been given special training about 'math sentences' (which don't correspond to much), so that they can inflate their "improvement" when people improve in their tests, which are mostly just about 'math sentences'.
That doesn't sound like a math class - that sounds like a product training class.
Richard Feynman would rant much about this.
Ryan Fenton
The problems with Common Core are manifold, from the (lack of) primary research behind it, to the squishiness of the outcomes. Here's a nice quote: "even if they said 3 X 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and oral explanations and they showed it in a picture but they just got the final number wrong; we’re really more focusing on the how and the why." (Fuzzy Math)
Since 1970 we've more than doubled per-pupil spending on primary and secondary students in real dollars (National Center for Education Statistics) with little to show in academic improvement. <sarcasm>But hey! We've found the problem! What we need to do is yoke all 50 states to a common set of education standards! That'll help!</sarcasm>
I abhor the intelligent design crap that some states try to shove into primary and secondary school curricula. However, all the power to them as long as I'm free to influence the math- and science-rich curriculum I want established in my state. I find it more repugnant that the Federal government sees fit to bribe states to adopt a one-size-fits-all model.
. . . don't give small children a WRITTEN math test. At that age, it becomes a reading test, really. So to help those who are bad at reading but reasonable at math, they used the idiotic wording. But using a minimum of words made it hard to formulate a question properlu. (And who keeps pennies in a cup - why not something vaguely familiar like a piggy bank or a wallet?)
To test five year olds, the teacher asks the questions orally and fill in the form him/herself. Yes, that means more work to do the test, but that's small children for you.
Written math tests are for children old enough that you take the reading part for granted.
No the q was 5 plus a cup which makes no sense "you have 5 dollars and billy gives me 3 dollars how many dollars do i have is a valid question. this is a arithmetic test not a situationist performance art work.
The teacher shows her a set of pictures of animals, and asks her to "Name the animals." She proceeds to... Spot (a dog), Whiskers (a cat), and so on. The teacher notes that she doesn't know her animals, not realizing she actually told her to NAME the animals, not identify them. Since she'd been playing Nintendogs for a few years at that point, she was used to naming animals, and that's exactly what she did.
Looks as though it was written by attorneys and legislators. No wonder it's so screwed up!
Is this the same Pearson that designs and administers tests for IT and other professional certifications? If so, it would explain a lot. The ones I've taken seem to be designed not to test your skills in the subject matter, so much as to test your capacity to parse bad English and to solve trick questions. It's horrifying to think that we are subjecting first graders to this crap.
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I expect kids to know calculus by the time they're in pre-school.
They spent 150 MILLION DOLLARS on this? Where on earth did the money go? This is like the first draft of a test written by a teacher who just doesn't care.
Bill Gates, if you are reading this, how about you give me just $1 million dollars and I will write you a much better standard, despite the fact that I don't know a damn thing about education. I do, at least, know how to read and write. I can research the rest.
You think the question isn't difficult? OK, then
5 pennies and a cup of milk with 6 written on the side. What is missing?
WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yes, and time matches on. You are now expected to know more and earlier.
This is a theme that is quickly saturating employers and is trickling down. Isn't it convenient that the only people that say it are the ones that will never have to go through things like this test. Making things harder for every consecutive generation only helps previous ones.
It is just another way of saying "Fuck you! Got mine."
I see alot of standardized tests because I homeschool
I get to see the standardized tests that are provided by various organization because I am compelled by state law to administer one per year to each of my three children so that the all-powerful, wise, and knowing local school district can be assured that my children are progressing along at a fine academic pace. The school district still worries about my kids being social weirdo's, but that's aside the point.
Everyone of these tests (Peabody, Stanford, Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and MN-CAT) that I've seen is horrible until the third grade because they assume the children can't read -- which is a fine assumption. So instead the kids are required to try to interpret problems based on pictures and other kinds of visual cues. The peabody is at least mostly verbale.
Probably 5% of the question even adults can't figure out. 10% the kids can't figure out.
So it's not news to people who have to admin the tests.
Putting ANY sort of "requirement" on a 5 year old is outrageous. Children develop at a different pace, especially at that age, and this year's math flunky could easily be next year's wiz kid. Unless you ruin it by sending the kid a clear message that she has no talent.
Paid for by our friends the Saudis.
The math and science standards in north america are horrible. My girl friend moved from China to Ontario at age 9 and she says that until Grade 9 she didn't learn a single new science or math concept. If we want to really make the system work for the kids we need to drastically revamp how we teach math and science and really follow the Asian standard.
Interestingly enough I was alive at the time of the events of 9/11/2001. And I remember that 17 of the 19 hijackers weren't Afghanis but Saudi Arabian. A full 89% were from our friend and ally in the middle east, Saudi Arabia.
A ridiculous Common Core test for first graders
It's all Addition and Subtraction and many of the images give the answers away. Any preschooler should be able to get a 100% and feel insulted by the exam. It's outrageous that they are complaining about giving multiple choice exams and actually grading it; what else are you expecting? A gold star for writing 1+1=Fish
Have gnu, will travel.
Putting ANY sort of "requirement" on a 10 year old is outrageous. Children develop at a different pace.
The question being criticized requires the child to generalize. Whether the generalization that the child is fairly or unfairly being asked to do the task appears to be the point of disagreement here. Also, the form and length of the test comes into play.
Question #1 is not particularly different from #5 or #7 except that the number is on a drawing of a cup instead of in a drawing of a square. Are we really putting that much weight of fairness on that difference? It seems that perhaps that the particular teacher is missing the point: we can't train students to only respond to numbers in squares. They should respond to numbers in triangles, circles, and cups as well. Yes, the cup is harder. What is wrong with testing contextualizing skills as well as the number skill?
I agree the children will not be helped if teachers are not ready to deliver the lesson. The teacher's guide for following up on this test was either wanting, or unread by the principal in question. It would be nice to hear what the teacher's guide for the test actually said.
The missing part is clearly several dollars if that's Starbucks coffee in the cup.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
what people are missing is how the subject is taught. i actually looked at the whole test and it's clear to me that visual aids were used in teaching this, specifically pennies. if you aren't thinking about psychology, you aren't considering how children process information. the test uses terms like "number sentence" but you dont see people screaming "it's an equation, not a sentence!" because it's something they can somewhat grasp. i assure you that if you were in the class, you would understand the test.
we arent teaching teens or college students, these are children with no knowledge of mathematics. take a moment and realize that the cognitive capabilities of a small child is like that of a chimpanzee. applying our knowledge of child psychology to teach children is a good thing because it will yield better results.
stop assuming you understand the best way to teach a child.
bold tag
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Guys, Question #1 is perfectly obvious. The writer went to his favorite diner in 1950 to buy a cup of coffee, which cost five cents at the time. When he got there, he was dismayed to realize the price had increased to six cents, so he couldn't afford it. The memory of the coffee that never was has haunted him for decades. A poignant reflection on the decreased purchasing power of the American penny.
Personally, I applaud the Common Core for ensuring that all six-year-olds have a thorough understanding of historical economics.
The main thrust of teaching kids maths at an early age should be that the things in it are intuitive. Adding 2 and 2 together to make 4 is intuitive. Having 10 carrots and taking away 6 of them to leave 4 carrots is intuitive.
Obviously children will vary in the speed at which they pick these things up but they are so straightforward as to be self-evident eventually, when the little switch clicks and they realise that the abstract numbers have an application to real world things.
This test is not intuitive. It seeks to use clumsy language to describe things ("number sentence"?!?) and it makes people who can think intuitively about maths struggle because they can't apply their understanding of normal language to ascertain what the questions are about. It's as if maths is some special clever thing which can only be described using special language. It serves the companies making these materials nicely because it makes what they're producing seem somehow more impressive/technical than it is.
Putting ANY sort of "requirement" on a 15 year old is outrageous. Children develop at a different pace.
The missing part is a proper question.
There is nothing wrong with these test
Other than the fact that it's just another idiotic multiple choice test that doesn't actually test students for a deep understanding of the material.
Ignorance is a choice
My objection to Common Core doesn't involve cherry picking questions and presenting them in media out of context.
The problem with Common Core is that it isn't ambitious enough. In some states the whining has already begun that it's too hard.
Wait until they learn that it's nowhere near hard enough. The states that actually try to give their kids a good education, like Massachusetts, are lowering their standards to participate in this program.
What are they thinking? Even though Massachusetts has the best statewide education system in the US, it still falls considerably short of the top programs in the world, say Singapore.
Common Core should require everyone to upgrade to the level of Massachusetts, and THEN start raising the bar from there.
And fuck all the legislatures and parents who whine about that being too hard.
The point of UNIVERSAL EDUCATION, a thing NOT common in any nation until the 20th Century, is absolutely NOT about educating the 'common man'. Indeed, if one looks at the original form of 'universal' education, it very much anticipated the 'need' to BETTER educate the children of the elites, and to identify and hone the best minds arising in the general population. As for the rest of the sheeple, well schooling was supposed to provide basic skills in MATHS and ENGLISH, but otherwise condition the kids to be as servile and useful as possible to futures generations of the elites.
The USA gets the worst of this. Social engineering at school at a level far beyond other nations. Take the recent 'NEW MATHS' for instance, the project from the last decade to massively decrease the maths skills/confidence of average American children, while leaving the maths scores of those with natural superior maths abilities unchanged (this later part is essential, for it allows the defenders of the 'new maths' curriculum to describe the kids whose maths scores fall of a cliff as lazy morons, or victims of incompetent teachers- when in reality extremely sophisticated educational psychologists crafted the teaching methods to lower the average achievements in the subject quite deliberately).
Bill Gates is the main force behind THREE very, very disturbing acts of warfare against American citizens.
1) his inBloom (the way pedophiles describe their child targets, and Gates' official corporate name) FULL SURVEILLANCE children database of EVERY child in the USA, across every aspect of their childhood, including levels of sexual development, and fundamental vulnerability factors (ie., the ability of abusers to target children with least risk of discovery/punishment). Gates created this system in DIRECT partnership with Rupert (Fox News) Murdoch, a person you sheeple are told is on the opposite end of the political spectrum to Bill Gates.
2) his NSA spying in every living room and child's bedroom device known as the XBOX ONE. The Xbox One comes with the Kinect 2, a platform of multiple, incredibly sophisticated spying sensors, that 99.5% of all console users are expected to set up in an optimal way in their homes, and leave PERMANENTLY connected to the internet. The 'time of flight' motion tracking sensor in the Xbox One is worth far more than the entire cost of the console, and was created using tens of billions of dollars from MS and the NSA, after Gates himself ordered the purchase of EVERY motion tracking company available (MS purchased at least three such companies). Kinect is provably USELESS for AAA gaming, and provably useless for boosting the sales of AAA gaming platforms. It is, however, the most comprehensive method of monitoring a room, and listening in to audio activity in adjacent rooms.
Every Xbox One continuously monitors the people present in a room, takes detailed photographs of their faces, and sends this data daily to NSA servers in the cloud, where the NSA performs facial recognition on the image data, and cross references this information against the (obviously) known geographic location of the console (usually, the actual address of the consoles location is already logged). Every Xbox One currently online announces itself to NSA servers, and can be requested to begin a very high quality realtime video stream within ten milliseconds. Special tailored spy-ware packages can be remotely sent to individual, grouped, or every online Xbone, for any kind of spying activity using the cameras (still and video, ordinary light and IR), motion tracking (including identifying sexual behaviour) and the microphone array (which can track multiple conversations in multiple rooms at the same time).
TODAY, people are complaining loudly about how BAD the coming versions of COD and BF4 are on the Xbone, compared to Sony's PS4. The games developers have CONFIRMED that even when the Xbox AAA games are running full blast, the Xbone still dedicates more than TEN PERCENT of its entire processing power to the Kinect sp
I have to clue what that test writer is smoking, but its got to be great stuff. But the people who actually approved this shit have got to be full blown crackheads. There simply is no other explanation that can begin to explain this level of abject stupidity.
Here I am, now 79 years old. I went through the so-called educational system back in the 1940's, and was once tested by the Iowa test as having an IQ roughly equ to 147 on the S/B scale. I am also the only one scoring over 40 on the 100 question AFQT I took in the middle of the Korean war, scored a 98 on that, next best was 39 in a group of 136 boys that day.
I have made my livelyhood for about 60 years now in electronics, making stuff work again when it quits, although I have now been retired from the Chief Engineers chair at the local CBS affiliate, a position I held since 1984, for a bit over 10 years, but just yesterday I had to go put our local daytime AM broadcaster back on the air.
But I don't blame my 8th grade education, having quit school and going to work fixing televisions in 1949, on my poor math education. I did get decent scores on the math they taught, but there was little to almost zip underlying theory, and I did not actually learn a usable amount of algebra, and am still poor at calculus to this day. My math teacher, the best one ever, was when in the early 70's, I bought a TI SR-51 calculator. Strictly enforcing the algebraic rules, it taught me more useful math of the stuff I needed every day, in a month than I learned in 8 years of schooling. When it gave you the answer, if it wasn't correct, it was off by so far that you _knew_ you had screwed up stating the problem to it.
I never did grok the RPN calculator craze, and while I had one for several years, I considered it a crutch for those who didn't ever understand the rules of math in the first place. It did NOT help me to solve the problems I encountered in every day repair, and occasionally redesign work, some of which was in digital stuff, done by high priced design people that never were in the same room with a book of recommended practices. Or mechanical, designed by people whose hands don't fit the tools. Mine has always fit the tools well.
I realize I am just one voice in the wilderness, asking when in the hell are the parents going to demand that their children actually get a good, 100% usable education from the socialist indoctrination centers our schools have become in the last 100 years?
But the reality is that there is so damned much federal money in the schools and they demand that the school boards do it their way if they want the money for that new school to replace the one the feds built in 1927. Said another way, if you want your kids to get a decent education, it will involve higher taxes to do it because you are not going to get that good education when there is a single penny of federal money in it.
The choice really is that when its boiled down to its essence.
This isn't it, not by a hell of a long row of apple trees. I was tempted to run for the local school board, but several conversations with other retired members of several boards, I learned they are so ham-strung by the need for federal money just to heat the buildings that most, still in good enough health & sound minds, simply gave it up and never ran for such a thankless job again. Their thoughts, like mine, are just that lonely voice crying out in the wilderness of mediocrity we have today, as exemplified by this example test's idiocy.
So, no cheers from Almost Retired this time folks. But it really is you and I, who will have to "foot the bill" who will have to fix it. And be aware, the feds will use every hammer they have to flatten you when you do.
I have nothing but respect for teachers. Everyone likes to demonize them as lazy government workers who get summers off and can't be fired, but they really have a crap job. Because all of those parents who demonize teachers got together and complained, we got No Child Left Behind and now the Common Core standards. Why? Because standardized tests are the only way to measure student progress, and teachers need to be evaluated based on student performance, right?
I don't know which type of school district would be worse -- the inner city public school doomed to permanent failure because of demographics, or the affluent one filled with Type-A parents who insist on micromanaging everything a teacher does. Either way, I'd hate to be the teacher who lost their job because they got stuck with a class full of idiots, or kids who had such awful home lives that they can't handle school. That's what people who push for the elimination of tenure don't get. I know several teachers, and they concede that there are bad apples in the system, but that teachers who do their jobs are protected by tenure from political machinations, crappy administrators, etc. And, every one of those teachers I know (in a relatively affluent area) has had a conversation with a parent that basically boils down to "You work for me, little public servant. Now do what my child demands." Not fun...
I looked at some of the early common core stuff, and it really does de-emphasize the rote memorization of math facts. When I was in school a million years ago, we just got a table of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, and were told "Memorize this." This new wordier approach is, IMO, a good way for students (and their parents) who are apprehensive about math to have it presented in a different way.
Is 823.
The average cost of a cup of coffee in the United States is roughly $1.38, according to this page: http://www.statisticbrain.com/coffee-drinking-statistics/. It's almost doubled if you're after espresso, but as there's no barista visible and espresso is generally served in smaller cups, we can only assume this is a cup of ordinary coffee.
I'm also going to make the assumption that this is in a state with no sales tax, and that the person buying six cups of coffee isn't also buying a box of doughnuts or a hot chocolate or tea for that one person in every group who isn't a coffee drinker.
$1.38 x 6 = $8.28, minus the five pennies makes $8.23.
This is, however, assuming that opportunity costs don't come into play. The buyer could save a few dollars by paying around $5.50 for a can of instant coffee, starting a fire using the old "Indian Method" of rubbing two sticks together, pouring in some purified river water (made using a jury-rigged solar purifier) and serving the coffee into six plastic cups stolen from a coffee shop. In this case, the answer is 545.
you have 5 dollars and billy gives me 3 dollars how many dollars do i have is a valid question.
Well, I have the 5 dollars, and you might now have 3 or more. If you hand over all your dollars I could count them, and then the answer would be zero.
This test is exactly like what my first grader does. They are taught a method for doing things, and the tests reflect that method. I've seen tests like this with my first grader, and he has no problem understanding what to do and doing it well. The missing context in this outrage is what goes on in the classroom to tease apart these basic concepts and apply them to everyday life. The first question is clear from the context: The whole is 6. I have a physical representation of 5 tokens. How many are left. Answer: 1. the other questions find other ways of expressing the same thing. The instruction in class teaches the technique. What's the deal here? Where's the beef?
One of the reasons why I do not finish my degree work is the experience I had when I was taking a computer science exam.
After taking the exam and getting a C on it, I protested that the solution I worked out was correct for a linked list, and in fact was superior to the one on the exam due to the fact I used void types and malloc, and not a static typed array. My list could use any type element it wanted too.
I was told I didn't follow directions and that the exam couldn't allow separate solutions because it would take too long to grade.
I quickly found this too be the case for my Mathematics classes and got sick and tired of spending gant wads of cash, to argue over solutions because these dicks didn't have the time to grade my papers.
Spending giant sums of money to a bunch of F'ing bankers and being told I just don't "get it" when I clearly was very good at CS was a lie.
It was cool-aid I wouldn't drink, so I left college and got a job then later started my own company many many years later.
Best decision I ever made in my entire life.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
What strikes me about this test is the utter alienness of its language and symbology.
Okay, it's been half a century since I took a test intended for children entering elementary school. I recognize a few of the sentence forms. Somebody has a certain number of guitar picks and gives some away, no problem. But the bizarre pennies to coffee cup equivalence, what the fuck is up with that? Who thought it was a good idea to assume that young children would know that the sentence in "number sentence" means what the rest of the world generally calls an "equation", or that a "subtraction story" conversely means a word problem? What is a "related subtraction sentence" and how does it differ from an ordinary subtraction sentence? Why are you using passive voice to ask questions of a five-year-old? Why do you think we need cubes to solve a linear equation?
What's meant by the fragmentary term "part I know"? Dude, I have no idea what you know. Try speaking in full sentences, like we're taught in school. Oh, right.
In short, this seems substantially to be a test of cultural indoctrination whose arithmetic pales in comparison to the challenge of getting inside the parochial mind of whoever developed the test. I'd be proud if my child failed this test. It's beyond absurd; I find it positively bigoted. These people need to get out and see more of the world.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
This is a terrible exam. It is meant to see if first graders can add and substract small (mostly single digit) numbers in lots of different ways. The first problem are the terrible questionsé
1. Pennies and a cup of liquid. Huh?
3. "Use cubes to solve" Huh?
10. Surely only innumerate teachers use the term "number sentence"
11. "Draw a picture to solve" - so why is there space for an equation?
6, 8, 12. Number sentences again.
12. You are asked to find the correct equation using subtraction, but all answers use addition.
Ok, that is all bad enough. However, the bigger problem is the level of expectations. I have two kids, one is really good at math, the other is average or below in native ability. By the end of first grade, both of them understood how to add arbitrary multi-digit numbers. Subtracting was more difficult, but that could add 10s, 100s, 100s, millions.
The idiotic math curricula treat each additional digit like it is somehow magic. They never explain the system, and this test proves it: they just barely expect kids to deal with numbers from 10 to 20. But: if a kid can add into two digits, it is a very small step to explain that that is the whole system. Any average first grade kid should be able to add any numbers at all.
This just shows that if you want even the simplest of things to fail, let the government get involved. That is why the Founding Fathers favored a small, limited government since anything greater would be beyond the ability of a government - that is what Capitalism is for - efficiency, quality, results. That is why the Government does everything it can to destroy Capitalism - it shows them for the inept idiots they are. Simple...
Putting ANY sort of "requirement" on a 15 year old is outrageous. Children develop at a different pace.
You think you're being clever, but what do you plan to do with the ones who fail your requirements?
Think carefully now, since inner-city crime and how dead you get from being mugged hinge on your answer.
While Bill Gates and others may talk about the declining state of education, there is a real movement by conservatives to use public money that funds education to enrich those who teach, by privatizing schools.
The Common Core is a strategy to standardize the curriculum across all the 50 states (which isn't a bad idea) but the people who write the standards and create the tests don't have our best interests at heart. By creating ludicrous tests, they are going to "prove" that the US students are failing terribly, especially those in public schools. Then there will be demands of reform, where they will promote pseudo public schools that use public funds ran in a for profit manner.
Once that happens, education which should not be a for profit enterprise, would be transformed into private enterprises that uses public funds to enrich companies like Pearson, Amplify, Thompson, etc.
Kids are not stupid, and challenging them is part of what school is about.
The moron whou thought a whole sentence was beyond the comprehension of a school-age child deserves to be flogged and fired. He's part of the problem.
Finding the math problem in a text problem was one of the most valuable lessons I remember from my early school days. Mostly because in the real world, you will encounter many more text problems than "1+2 = ?" ones.
The problem with dumbing-down is that necessarily information gets lost. The first is tone and texture. For an example, compare just the introduction of the articles on "love" in Wikipedia, in regular english and in simple english.
There's just a lot of depth lost in the simple english.
But if you dumb down even more, then meaning starts to get lost. For example, the fact that love is an interpersonal emotion is not mentioned in simple english. You probably didn't notice because we all know what love is (more or less), so we add missing information without noticing. But someone who doesn't know can't do that, and so the aliens in Tau Ceti who get a copy of Wikipedia won't understand a lot about love from the simple english article.
We're living in a world where everything is getting dumbed down. Mostly for profit reasons (more audience if more people understand it), but also for misunderstood benevolence reasons. If you know anything about people, you never dumb something down to their level, ever. If you want to do them good, you dumb it down to slightly above their level, so they can understand it and grow at the same time. You never remove the challenge completely, because we humans, like all animals, are lazy by nature and won't extend effort unless we have to.
And if you want to make absolutely sure that someone understands a question, you need to add information, not remove it. The more terse a package of information is, the more effort the receiver has to make to extract the information from it, unless it was carefully crafted to make extraction easy.
That is true for both compression and prose (the famous "sorry that this letter is so long, I didn't have time to write a short one" line - creating a short and yet informative package is quite a bit of work).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Filthy shills ALWAYS spam forums like this telling you that the people getting the answer wrong are fundamentally stupid, and the proof of this is the people getting the answer 'correct'. Let me explain their evil trick with a real world example.
Years back, at a hotly contested US election, some districts became notorious because many of their voters seemed to have been 'confused' by their voting cards, and these voters claimed to have accidental registered a vote for the wrong person. Filthy shills flooded the internet demanding this problem be IGNORED because the voters were clearly victims of their own stupidity. However, in reality NOTHING could be further from the truth.
1) Many US elections are decided by less that 1% of the actual vote, well below what is normally considered statistical 'NOISE' in the voting system. This makes manipulating the vote dishonestly VERY easy.
2) US law specifically gives the party in current power the right and duty to craft the local METHODS used for voting. There is vanishing little Federal oversight of this process. Thus, the party in power is given a free hand to cheat, so long as the cheating is 'invisible'
3) Voting is answering a question, or a series of questions, obviously. Psychologists (long before this formal label even existed) have always recognised the way in which you ASK a question influences the answers you receive. Tipping the answers of a LARGE number of respondents in a given direction greater than 1% is a fairly trivial exercise.
4) The people creating voting materials have months and years to test them. Using different test groups, one can therefore hone material most likely to create 'MISTAKES' in the favourable direction of given candidates.
5) The people engaged in electorial cheating can rely on armies of paid and unpaid shills to argue after the fact that no cheating occurred, and that the voters themselves were responsible for their own mistakes of the fallacious argument that those voters who voted 'correctly' prove that correct voting was possible for all. This would be the same logic as a criminal CONMAN claiming innocence because of all the people who failed to fall for his con, despite the existence of those that did become his victim.
When a maths test is created and qualified at any significant level (eg., not the work of a drunk teacher one Friday night for the use of a class of 25 the following Monday), you know that its outcome is quite deliberately intended. Destroying the maths confidence of hundreds of thousands of children early in their educational career is an incredible victory for the monsters that rule over you.
Less than ONE HUNDRED years ago, your masters were happy to send hundreds of thousands of you to your pointless deaths in the slaughterhouses known as the battlefields of WW1, and yet you brainless sheeple still think your masters have your best interests at heart. It is this inherent thickness that explains why you and your children get less than zero respect from the monsters that rule over you- and why they are happy to abuse you so badly. The war mongering atrocity known as Obama received the zionist controlled Nobel Peace Prize simply for being the first 'black' US president, and yet American sheeple, raised on a social engineered diet of 'cool' 'black' sports heroes (while the number of ordinary black American citizens crammed into the criminal penal system rises each year) gave Obama their unwavering love.
You sheeple don't think (as the comments here so painfully prove)- you RESPOND. So long as you 'LOVE' a handful of marketed and managed 'black' 'heroes' each year, you can turn a blind eye to the most abusive 'justice' system on the planet, and not give a damn about the real plight of the descendants of slaves that the USA was so proud to use and abuse in every sickening way imaginable. This is how hopeless the American sheeple are- and why American sheeple have always been the easiest to manipulate. Bill Gates just seeks to make maximum 'scientific' use of the possibilities your American sheeple mindset creates.
Particularly I find the question 9 very confusing:
"Write a subtraction story for 8; Draw a picture!"
What the hell is a "subtraction story"? How should a 6-year old child know that? And the correct answer for 8 apparently was subtraction (4=7-3), so how comes 8 was not a subtraction story already???
Only a teacher who is no good at teaching.
The problem is that even IF little Johnny would be good in math he will fail with this kind of test. This test does not test math. It tests whether you're able to wrap your mind around the way someone else asks questions. That's like playing a computer RPG and not playing your character but instead trying to ponder what the programmer wanted you to do to progress.
This test is not about math, it's about bending your mind to the twisted world of a teacher. I.e. a perfect preparation for the time when you work where you have to bend your mind to fit into the twisted world of a manager.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
FIVE lights.
Not just "friend and ally", but also a very wealthy country — whereas the text was implying, the hijackers came from an impoverished one...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
5 pennies and a cup of milk with 6 written on the side. What is missing?
WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?
Two things: The milk bottle and the sharpie.
The point isn't that it's "too hard". The point is that the way it is asked leaves way too much room for questions, especially if even the teacher can't clarify what the hell is asked from the kid.
I can only assume that the goal was to test whether the pupil is able to abstract from the 5 "coins" they get shown to the abstract number of 6 being the total and being able to understand that they are missing 1 to make the equation. Of course, the child would phrase it differently, but that's (at least IMO) the intended test.
The presentation is what made even me scratch my head briefly. And I tend to think that I know a tad bit more about math, life, tests and all the other things that could possibly increase my chances to succeed in this test than the average 5 year old.
I think wanting to see whether a 6 year old understands the abstract concept of numbers vs. countable objects and putting them in context is quite fine, and while I do not think every 6 year old will succeed, most are able to comprehend that. The problem is that there are just way too many ways to misinterpret the presented question for a young child. I'll try to tap into my inner 6 year old and let him explore that a bit.
"Hmm. I have 5 parts and I should make a cup out of them. When I stack them, they look a bit like the cup, then I only gotta make a hole into them. And the 3 ... or the 2 ... yes, definitely the 2 is a perfect handle for it!"
The problem is that you present way too many variables to the kid. A 6 year old is not able to filter "important" from unimportant information in a test situation. For you and me these 5 "discs" could be coins, oreos or for all we care flying saucers, and the cup could contain milk, molten lead or your grandma's last urine sample, do we care? No, because we know it doesn't matter for the question asked. For the child everything you show him is equally important because he lacks the life experience to determine which information to keep and which to throw out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The tests are already worthless if every child gets the same result. Getting a leveled playing field is a very good indicator that something is going very wrong. And I somehow predict that these tests will come up with fairly equal results all over the board.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You think the question isn't difficult? OK, then
5 pennies and a cup of milk with 6 written on the side. What is missing?
WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?
I would say sinij's brain, but that's just cuz I'm an asshole.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Math with numbers? Where are the Greek letters?
Well, I taught my daughter the Pythagorean Theorem when she started kindergarten. Is that close enough?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
And yet the cretins on Slashdot will do exactly what ALL communists/Jews/Bolsheviks (is there a difference?) do - silent dissent. Nobody is allowed to DEBATE these tyrants, because, of course, they are wrong.
Common Core is more socialism by the back door, brainwashing children into being part of the 'Jew World Order' - sorry - 'New' World Order, where there are no more nations, no more shared histories, because of 'diversity', and the poor, hard done by Jews, who create almost ALL the currency in the world, out of thin air, will be ruling over us, with criticism of Jews punishable by DEATH, just like it was in Bolshevik Russia, when the Jews took over and murdered around 50 MILLION Russian Christians. How kind of them.
This stupid five pennies question just reveals how the insane mind of a communist works - they have to destroy everything, and they enjoy doing it.
It's QUITE obvious that schools do not prepare children for adult life, but are simply there to brainwash them into being cogs in the machine - the machine of the Eternal JEW...
How many of you have even done ANY research into the so-called 'Holocaust'? I mean - apart from believing everything the Jew-owned media tells you, and everything lying Jews tell you about their 'eyewitness' testimony?
What is missing?
The most brilliant answer is to not answer such suckiness (why, is left as an exercise to the "tutor").
I usually score above average in such tests. I dream how I would perform if I felt motivated by such tests and curriculum. However, our society teaches us to suck, and to medicate ourselves when we are bruised trying to break the mold, and so life goes on for most of us.
Captcha: transit
You just beat some 5 year olds. You are sooo smart. On the other hand, a really (socially) smart person would not have spent their entire comment space here merely to congratulate themselves for the "achievement". Sorry if that sounds pretty negative, but come on, a test for 5 years olds and here you go telling us how great you are! And it is ALL you are telling us.
How do so many "smart" people continually come up with the dumbest testing criteria and questions. It boggles the mind...there are real consequences caused by inadequately designed tests especially at the developmental level this type of testing is aimed toward.
I think the real problem is that the children are brainwashed into thinking "money".
What's that?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Welcome to America - land of the entitled idiots.
You keep expecting a math test to have answers that are "right" and "wrong". That's just a liberal plot.
Here in Missouri, we require our math tests to present a more balanced view of math and science questions that includes a traditional, faith-centric approach.
"If Jesus is speaking to thirty-thousand people, and he wants to feed them all but he only has two loaves and three fishes, how many pieces will he have to divide them into?
A) 30,000
B) N/A. He just kept producing magical loaves and fishes because he's divine.
C) None. Jesus told them to get a damn job so they can feed themselves and stop being takers."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Common Core doesn't specify questions or tests - this is just a shitty test, that happens to meet (maybe?) Common Core.
There's a lot of misunderstanding (and hence vitriol) about CC out there; Common Core says your students need to have certain skills. How you develop them is up to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_Initiative#Mathematics_Standards
Please help metamoderate.
1) A terrorist boards a plane. The stewardess says he must check his AK-47 in with his checked bags. How many rounds of ammunition can he keep in order to get ketchup and a pickle with his in flight meal?
2) A stripper winks at a patron after he stuffs a $20 in her G-string. How many more winks does she need to give before her pimp chokes on his own vomit in the back alley?
3) A kid rides a bike without a helmet. How far can he go before the drunk driver crashes into the tree?
4) A violent psychiatric patient is ripping a newspaper into paper dolls as she isn't allowed scissors. How many times does she need to sneeze before the boogers on the paper gets an arts funding grant?
These questions are all straightforward. Any kid who can't get them clearly needs to be held back!
OK, this is ridiculous. I’ve read the linked articles and many of the comments here and elsewhere, and while there is a lot to say about the Common Core in general, I will limit myself simply to question 1 of the test. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is an atrocious test question, an abomination that should never appear on any math test, let alone a 1st grader‘s! Think that’s too strong? Well tell me, then, why is the coffee cup marked with a 6 and labeled below as “whole“ even there? Can anyone at all explain to me why 5 pennies (or what appear to be 5 pennies) have anything at all to do with a friggin’ coffee cup? Is this to do with the price of a cup of coffee? Clearly not, but the thought must occur even to 5th graders, since there are coins involved... And thus confusion creeps in right from the start, merely from looking at the pictures. One immediately wonders, are we measuring price or quantity? The possibility that it might be price-related serves only to confuse, and has no business on a test of basic math skills. I should say right here that besides pennies it also occurred to me that the disks might represent volume, 3D slices of an idealized cylindrical “cup” of liquid, and it’s not impossible that a bright 1st grader with good visual thinking skills might think the same thing, only... The cup in the picture isn’t cylindrical. So then, more entirely unnecessary potential for confusion, this time seemingly aimed directly at the gifted student. I can’t tell you how many times I messed up on tests when I was a kid because I assumed extra complexity existed on what were in actuality very simple problems. The stating of what is required on a test question should be clear and unambiguous. This example here is riddled with ambiguity, and that’s just looking at the drawing!
So then, it appears there’s no real relation between the pennies and the coffee cup, they’re just arbitrarily chosen icons used to test the understanding that a numeral (the 6 on the cup) can represent quantities of an item (the coins), and that one can do subtraction by converting the 5 coins to a number 5, which subtracted from the whole of 6 is the answer 1. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but nothing is gained from using coins and a cup, in fact it seems deliberately confusing! I’ve no background in education, but I’m pretty damn sure that trick questions should not be appearing on a 1st grade test of basic math skills, except possibly as a bonus for extra credit. So why not use units and pictures that make sense? A pie and individual slices comes to mind.
Then there’s the wording. What exactly is meant by “part I know”? Talk about ambiguity! Why not say “the part you know about”, or even better, “the portion of the whole you know about”? The wording on these kinds of problems really matters, kids shouldn’t have to guess at the meaning! By keeping the caption short and vague you add unnecessary ambiguity. This does make the answer harder to arrive at, but it does so in a way that cannot possibly be beneficial to the teacher or student. Even the title reading "find the missing part" is ambiguous... The missing part of what? Surely there are better ways to specify exactly what's being asked of the test-taker in this question. Ambiguity in all its forms should always be avoided, because by its very nature it can’t be used to test for comprehension of specific concepts, and testing the understanding of very specific concepts is the stated goal of this particular test!
Look, this is ridiculous. I know nothing at all about writing tests, or about education in general, yet I can easily and quickly pick apart the many problems with this one question. You’re telling me professionals who study this stuff for a living can’t do any better than this? There is simply no excuse for questions like this appearing on an important stand
There's more good stuff from your link:
Omitted in this “scientific text” is the existence of other scientific data and theories, for example, the cyclical nature of the planet’s climate and the impact of solar activity on Earth’s temperatures. Nor does it mention the fact that the concept of man-made global warming is most actively promoted by those politicians who have a vested interest in imposing government regulations, which would allow them a greater control over the economy and people’s lives.
Sounds like she's just upset that she isn't drilling her own ideology into the students.
I have got my first year of school book , saved thanks to my mother as memorabelia, and you know what the question are ? "What is the result of the following additions : " follows a long list of additions like "2+4" or "1+6" with increasing difficulty, the last one being "17+18". FFS there is no mention of cup, kids pennies or whatever. Why not just ask the question simply ?". 4-5 year old kid are not dumb.
you know: born rich and a nice person but not too bright, but obviously needs a "good eduaction" paper (to be taken ...
serious when taking over dads empire), so they had to build in a back door for these cases.
the "right" people will get the "hints" and thus score along okay with "bulk" population
not rationally...not at all...those 5 discs do not look at all like they could be assembled into the cup no matter what the 6th piece looked like
those 5 things (the discs) are too small and not shaped properly to add up to form something as large as the cup (even if you added some ridiculous final 'piece') and no one would think otherwise
if what you say is true, the question would be forcing the child to **think wrongly** about the 5 coins....
the fact that some (theoretically educated) adults defend this question at all is a clue as to the source of idiotic ideas like 'Common Core'
Thank you Dave Raggett
Someone at Pearson came up with a bad question.
Whelp, we might as well never have common standards than!
You hit the nail on the head. Numerous but relatively minor details in a large program rollout are to be expected. The benefit of establishing standards outweighs the difficulties of establishment.
I looked at the questions and got 100% correct. The questions are very easy and every 6 year old child should get 100%.
Maybe the first question is a little bit funny, don't know why they used a cup, they should have used a box like in the other questions.
But only because your kid is stupid (got just 45%) and the first question is a little bit funny, the whole curriculum is labelled as bad.
Looking at the Pdf, your kid is just stupid.
Question 4. is very obvious; Question 11, your kid can't do subtractions 7-2!=6; Question 7: 4+8!=6, and Question 9 is empty: 8-x=2
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Everything I remember from theodp is a hackfest, promoting one-sided arguments and in many cases non sequitur inflammatory garbage. I usually play "spot the nonsense" which is usually easy.
Anecdotes do not make evidence, associate the borg leader who just donated money and didn't really do anything wrong other than make nerds angry, assume that parent and teacher experience can determine whether a child would get an answer correct without knowing how the curriculum or preparation was introducing topics, and using the worst example as representative of the whole.
These are egregious errors. Not as bad as scoring first graders on a multiple choice test, but pretty bad.
The pennies problem is obviously supposed to be 6-1=5, and they had to do something to prevent students from counting all the pictured pennies, or other solutions which did not involve just counting for the answer. It was a poor solution to the difficult problem of writing a good question, and not age appropriate. But it hardly reeks of failure.
What happened to 6 - 5 = x
what's the value of x?
Or if you wanna complicate the kids life a bit, 5+x = 6 .. idk... my math tests growing up had.. well... math in it..
Until at least age 7 or 8, and usually later, kids have a very poor grasp of conservation of volumes.
Good catch, I hadn't thought of that.
For $150 million, a proper QA team could point out problems like this. Passing it by people with other perspectives and different experience would be very useful. Kid-testing would also be useful (meaning: ask the kids what they think the question means).
Even the most rudimentary of research shows that Common Core is a federal initiative. Which is completely unconstitutional as the federal government cannot run a national curriculum, so the they use proxy entities to push the program. Google Arne Duncan and Common Core.
The whole thing is about dumbing down and indoctrinating children. You will encounter bullshit like sustainability, social justice, and these bizarre math problems which are designed to confuse the hell out of small children.
Here's Common Core teaching materials encouraging kids to make arguments from emotion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGph7QHzmo8&list=FL_ri3HQq107Wo4h21-XfA-Q&index=30
Asian kids excel and beat us in about every academic subject, but rather than trying to emulate what they're doing, we're going down the path of leftist social engineering.
There are a couple of statistical calculations test makers can use to find and fix bad questions
You're missing the point entirely.
The examples shown in TFA are blithering-idiot-level errors. Some of those questions were written by people who have alarmingly poor cognitive/communication abilities, and should never have been hired for that kind of work.
The problem here is not a lack of statistical analysis. The problem is that Pearson hired fucking idiots, and that the higher levels of management at Pearson allowed that to happen. The thing that's "rotten to the core" here is the severe systemic incompetence in Pearson's organization.
Omitted in this “scientific text” is the existence of other scientific data and theories, for example, the cyclical nature of the planet’s climate and the impact of solar activity on Earth’s temperatures. Nor does it mention the fact that the concept of man-made global warming is most actively promoted by those politicians who have a vested interest in imposing government regulations, which would allow them a greater control over the economy and people’s lives.
That's why I don't read such sites that have an obvious agenda to push, like "The People's Cube: We cure weak liberalism with strong communism". Man-made global warming is "promoted" by scientists with hard evidence that already took the "cyclical nature" and the "solar activity" in consideration. If The People's Cube don't agree then they could publish scientific article in Nature how stupid 99% of all climatologists are.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Does it? To me it seems quite the opposite — she is upset, that anyone is able to drill an ideology into students. Because no one should be in that position — except the student's parents...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Bad at math = Bad at life
Three words: Hide The Decline. However you spin that, the credibility of "hard evidence" is in pieces even if you didn't know, that the most famous promoter of the idea has recently purchased a major piece of real estate on the coast — rather than in, say, Colorado mountains. When he sells that and moves higher in-land, wake me up to reconsider.
Meanwhile, scratching the surface of any remaining promoter of the idea, that "something must be done" — like giving the government ever more control over our lives — is bound to reveal a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...
Green on the outside, red on the inside — watermelons...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Your subject line is 100% on the mark: Failure is the expected & intended result.
Low test scores that result from this test make a great lever to use to privatize schools and/or get rid of teachers that can't get their kids to pass this charade. Corporate America gets to cluck their tongues at the crop of obvious dolts-in-ye-making an lobby their pet congressperson to allow ever more H1-B and offshored/temp labor to compensate.
I'd say this is working as designed.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Apparently not, if you test the ability and familiarity with the material, it is quite possible that every child get nearly 100% on the test. It sounds to me that what you actually want is to try to rank children relative to each other.
No, it is a very badly written test. Such people shouldn't be testing anyone.
2012 is a bad movie, I liked the first part with the volcano and where the earth crust rips open, nice special effects. But the rest was just bad; and the science is laughable.
Clime change is in 100s of years, one prediction is 1.75 meter in 500 years with four time the current CO2 level. You don't have to migrate to mountains to avoid that. Or I misunderstood where you go with your beach house example.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
This is what you would get if you let the author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the text adventure) write your tests.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
None of this is surprising considering the semi-literate point and click nature of MicroSwift!
Well, in this case, maybe we should change our priorities a little — because currently, for example, America's government spends more fighting "global warming", than illegal immigration...
But, perhaps, you just don't know something, our government does... Judging by Administration's directives, the threat is much more immediate than "in 100s of years".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You assign the kid to a "lower" math group or, hold the kid back a year if they are doing poorly in many subjects. There should always be a path to higher groups as well as a potential "demotion" to lower groups. In fact, one would expect a substantial number of kids to change groups in various subjects. Clearly some time needs to be set aside to mentor those who are doing well in lower groups to help them make the jump up to the more challenging group (as they would have "missed" some material that the more advanced kids would have been exposed to by being in the higher groups).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
> "within 20 to solve word" ..
> DOE should have more say
The people who wrote that should have MORE control over elementary curriculum? No thanks.
Over the last 60 years, DOE has had more and more involvement. As their involvement has increased, US scores have fallen further and further compared to other countries.
On the other hand, if students and parents could choose between two or three nearby schools, the schools that suck wouldn't get any students. There would be an incentive for each school to improve.
For optimal results, those two or three schools would be able to try slightly different methods to find ways that work better. For teachers compensation, one might focus on seniority, another on subjective evaluation of teachers, and another on results of standardized testing. Parents could send their kid to the school that works the best. To have the flexibility that optimal results require, DOE's role would be limited to providing parents with guidance on choosing the best school, such as by reporting graduation rates, test averages, etc.
Ummm,
While I think the statements are bull shit and have a racist (?) / elitist agenda the reality of the matter is something like the top 1% hold 90%+ of the wealth in Saudi Arabia. In other words most of the population is extremely poor. To that extent there is some truth to the statement.
I attended an academic program in Paris, France in 2000. One thing I can say from experience is that the rich in Saudi Arabia have no understanding of the value of money. It literally flows from the ground (the concept you've always been told as a child, “money doesn't grow on trees” is false). I have also been to elite camps in the United States with kids from places like Kuwait, Mexico, and other countries. The places the rich and elite send there kids. There is no comparison between American rich and Saudi Arabian rich. The remainder of the population is generally dirt poor.
One last thing to remember is that while the masses in American (and much of Europe, Australia, Canada, and 20 or so other countries) have achieved a level of middle class unseen the American system is also significantly f'd up. It's something like the top 10% control 90% of the wealth and the significance of the wealth is such that even with only 10% of it hitting the rest of the population you can still have a well-off middle class. However the US still has a 30% which is impoverished despite that.
* Note: None of these numbers are accurate. They're just rough guesstimates that are meant to emphasize a point about the disparity.
...Who could count out pennies into a cup.
Let's have them on national television, explaining their stupidity. Let's tar and feather these sick nation wreckers. This nonsense didn't come about by accident, it's a DELIBERATE ploy to destroy children's ability to understand the basics of the world around them, just like 'whole language' reading. It is DESIGNED to confuse them and make them unable to think and understand properly, so they will be easier to brainwash into the 'new world order' (JEW world order, more like).
This is why we have so many cretins on Slashdot today who mod people down when they dare to tell the truth about the JEWS who are destroying the entire world...
Perhaps Pearson is full of blithering idiots. A course I took with Pearson content suggests they don't train people in writing quiz questions.
MY point is that Pearson didn't write common core, so Pearson's bad qquestions in no way reflect on common core. Common core may be bad because most things dictated from on high aren't great, but TFA's examples of Pearson questions tell us nothing about common core.
As for idiot mistakes, maybe Pearson is a bunch of idiots, but maybe not. I consistently score in the top 0.1% on any test, and I make idiot mistakes more often than I care to admit. I took a programming certification exam recently. When I gave the certification agency some feedback, they hired me to go through the entire test bank and improve it. When I was done, they paid me a bonus for doing a good job. So I'm a good programmer, right? Yesterday I completely screwed up the fire school by making a dumb programming mistake after my boss had already warned me about the problem. So even the best of us produce crap occasionally.
How to put it to an idiot. Not all coastline is the same, some is elevated well above sea level and some like say Florida is only slightly above sea level. As sea levels rise and major storms occur, in conjunction with tides, sea levels rise at the coast line. This can be very high including waves 3 metres or more, however if your property is situated higher than that and well constructed you do not have a problem. Now, idiot, as you can see from the external view the property is in fact well and truly above sea level, in fact on the top of a hill. The colour you are looking for is of course maroon.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Unfortunately, this is the tip of the iceberg and I've had a front row seat to this as a parent with a child in 1st grade and one in 5th grade in New York State public schools.
The first step were the high stakes tests that our kids had to take last year. Tests which showed only 30% of New York State kids passing. This helped reinforce the message that politicians have been spouting that our public school system is broken and needs to be fixed. (Where "be fixed" means by them and by big businesses like Pearson.) Of course, nobody was allowed to see these tests so we could see if they were developmentally appropriate or if they were scored right. Pearson made the tests, graded them, and then they were destroyed. They don't help the teachers improve lessons (unlike normal tests which can show that Johnny is weak in some areas and might need extra help) and they just stress out the kids.
These tests, by the way, are tied to the teachers' jobs. A teacher whose kids do poorly (like, say, one with special education students) can find themselves out of a job. So teachers have a strong incentive to make sure their kids do well on the tests. Any time teaching ANYTHING not on the test is time wasted. So whole subjects get nixed in favor of test preparation. MONTHS are spent taking practice tests (bought from Pearson) and rehearsing items that might come up on the tests. Our kids are getting very good at answering A, B, C, or D, but not much else.
The next step, in New York State at least, is that EngageNY was forced into the classrooms. Remember every good teacher you ever had. What did those teachers do? They probably made learning fun, right? Make it interesting in their own unique way. Don't you with every teacher was that good? Well, too bad. EngageNY is a series of scripts that tells teachers what to say and when and even HOW to say it. It dictates how long each section of each lesson should take and how students should respond. Teachers are NOT to go off script no matter what... even if they themselves don't understand just what the script is trying to tell them to teach.
Call me crazy, but making every teacher teach the same lesson in the same manner to every kid doesn't seem like it will help children. Last I checked, every child is different. Some may learn well one way but not another way. It's a teacher's job to find the best way to reach his/her students and teach them the material. The whole point of Common Core is to make kids ready for college, but by the time they get to college, they're going to look upon school and learning as a boring activity and won't want to proceed.
So why Common Core? Because some big businesses looked at education and said "that's an untapped market." Why have these public schools when the businesses can turn a profit off kids? Why have teachers write lesson plans when a business can make a profit selling lesson plans?
In fact, Pearson and other businesses have more to gain if kids fail. They can sell books to help the kids, lessons to make the teachers "teach better", sessions for administrators on how to better push more Pearson products into schools. If the kid passes, all those potential sales go away.
This isn't even getting into the mess that is InBloom - putting tons of confidential student information online without the consent of parents. I'm sure the security will be totally uncrackable, right? I mean kids social security numbers, dates of birth, medical conditions, home addresses, etc. all online. Totally safe.
Parents are beginning to understand just what is happening and they're fighting back. In New York State, Commissioner John King cancelled a series of forums on Common Core when he said "special interest groups" co-opted the forums. Video of the forum got out, though and it turned out that those "special interest groups" were upset parents. When backlash over the cancelled forums got too big, he reinstated them - making them at the exact time that school let out to keep parents and teach
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Just for kicks and giggles, I took a look at some of the common core sample problems offered online. I looked at the sample math problems for 12th grade level. They looked like stuff I was doing in the 4th or 5th grade at the latest. There were very few if any that I couldn't do in moments in my head.
The sort of math problems I remember doing in high school generally required a pencil and anywhere from 0.5 to 3 pages of paper to complete. Some test problems allowed Ti-83/89 style calculators, others didn't. I'm pretty sure between homework and tests, I used every function on my graphing calculator at least once before I graduated high school.
If this is the new standard for high school graduates, then a couple of decades from now, employers will be lucky if they can find an American candidate that can successfully tie their own shoes without assistance.
Having looked at several school district pay levels, you might be able to find $35k for a new teacher, in a low paying district. $45k-$50k looks like more common teacher pay.
No, when you object to some of the most well-researched science around these days, and want it to be replaced with a bunch of ad homenims, that's drilling an ideology.
On the one hand you have established, well-understood science, and on the other you have vague incredulity that nobody else has ever thought of your arguments, plus the vague (or not-so-vague) suspicion that it's really all a conspiracy. I've yet to meet any of these pseudoscientific proponents who was really willing to argue the science - and because of it, people get tired of trying to explain things to these people and start telling them to just shove off, which is a shame because they interpret that as further evidence of the conspiracy, that they've found a hole in the argument as opposed to just exhausting everybody else's tolerance of willful cluelessness.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
There you go with ad homenims again. Who cares what Al Gore does? Even if global warming was going to swamp his house in the short term, surely he can afford to shore up, or even lose, a house.
What exactly do you think "hide the decline" means? Do you have a counter-explanation that's more plausible than the given one? Which, to save you the trouble, is:
Note that it needs to be compelling enough to justify the complexity of the "thousands of people are perpetrating a fraud on a massive scale with very little evidence" conclusion that follows naturally.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
It's starting in New York already. We had a round of high stakes testing from Pearson which showed about 70% of the kids failing. The governor started calling for the "death penalty" for public schools who don't raise their scores. So if public schools are shut down, how are kids going to be educated? Simple. He'll have his business buddies open charter schools - run by businesses, for profit, but with money from the public school pot and without those pesky requirements that teachers have degrees in education. Of course, charter schools can pick and choose who they accept, so special needs kids will be excluded. If those kids' parents are rich enough, they can send them to a private school. (We actually looked into that for our boys, but it would require spending 30% of our income on their schooling when we're barely making ends meet.) Otherwise, the kids would be stuck in the few public schools left. Public schools which would be even more underfunded (as charter schools drain more and more money from the public school pot).
Make no mistake about it: Replacing public schools with Pearson Education Incorporated is the end game of all of this.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Q: what is missing
A: common sense
Saudi Arabia may technically be a wealthy country, but the vast majority of its people live in poverty.
This space intentionally left blank
I found this term strange when I started tutoring students in elementary and middle school as I had not heard it before. However, the students were familiar with the term and, even though I was unfamiliar with it, I didn't have to ask anyone what it meant as it was pretty obvious (albeit, initially, awkward). I don't think this term causes much, if any, damage as long as it's abandoned as the students become more mature and sophisticated and when terms such as "equation" become more accessible and necessary. Although, I'm somewhat concerned when I've seen it still applied at the 7th grade level.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The root cause problem is letting for-profit corporation define these tests. They're probably copyrighted - wait for the DMCA take-downs. Pearson is well known for that.
These have to be created by educators, not by some low-paid clerk at Pearson.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The idea that parents should drill an ideology into their children is horrific.
You're right, we should be fighting harder the notion that people are "illegal" merely for deciding to come to America.
A primary school teacher showed me a test with questions like this that they had to give to students. The questions were extremely tedious and felt more like riddle solving, how do these questions apply to real Math applications?
1) What's another good title for this story? a) The sun b) Timmy goes to the park c) Rain and sun d) Timmy takes a nap 2) Why did Timmy put on dry socks? a) Because Timmy was home b) Because his socks were wet c) Because he was sleepy d) Because Timmy wanted to go back to the park So question #1 is asking for an opinion, and question #2 is asking about something that's not mentioned in the story. After my kid missed both questions, I asked the teacher why, and her answer was that the questions are introducing higher learning. Higher learning? An opinion is higher learning? Asking questions that are full of assumptions not mentioned in the story, is higher learning?
I think I see what they've done here. This sort of question typically appears in tests aimed at identifying stages of cognitive development, the sort of tests used to diagnose learning difficulties, or as data for scientific papers on child development. These are supposed to tell us when children are ready for more abstract tasks based on more sophisticated modes of thought.
This sort of test is not the sort of thing you should be giving a grade for, though, because at its root, it's not a taught skill. Either a child is at that stage where (question 1) they see the whole story in terms of the "big picture" (hence correct answer) or they are still too immature and fixate on one of the events (wrong answer). Either they're at the stage where their brain reflects on other people's actions and reasons about their motivation (correct answer) or they're still at that stage where they have no concept of it (and the wrong answer is given).
TLDR: they're testing cognitive development, which cannot be taught. Idiots.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
So what IS the question asking??
Perhaps in the context of the rest of the test the question makes more sense?
But WTF is a "penny"??
That could work as long as there was enough space for all students to go to the best school(s). Unfortunately what would likely happen is that the schools with wealthier students would try paying their teachers more(and so being able to get the best ones), while the schools that had poorer students would try increasing their class sizes to 100 to see if in increased competition would improve grades. Any any parents trying to move their kids to the 'better' schools would be told that there is just no space available.
I could post examples of questions created by instructional designers at the government agency I work for that are also horrible. Neither government nor private companies have a monopoly on stupid.
The big difference is that if a private company sells crap, purchasers can switch to a better vendor. If the government mandates garbage, you're screwed.
Mod this up to +11
Those are both problems. SOLVED problems.
> with wealthier students would try paying their teachers more(and so being able to get the best ones), while the schools that had poorer students
Instead of handing $10,000 of tax money to whichever school is nearest the student, the money goes to the school that the parents choose. It's thesame money being spent today. The only difference is that in order to get the money and students, schools need to not suck. We have a limited form of this where Ilive and it works well.
In fact, where I live not only do we have GOOD schools that students and parents can choose, they can choose the one that's best FOR THEIR CHILD. We have a high school for the arts, a collegiate high school where students graduate with an associate's degree, etc. All are tuition free - as public schools, they are financed by taxes
> raising the class size to 100
Schools here haven't tried that because if they did, students wouldn't choose that school. What they have done is ask students who are leaving "why are you choosing the other school?" They look at what works in the next school to see if it would work for them. Sometimes they decide to emulate the other school, sometimes it's different strokes for different folks. The science academy, for example, doesn't try to be just like the school for the arts.
>
Academia is now dominated by "right-brain" thinkers. These are people who are artistic, imaginative, intuitive who see things as a whole and are interested in patterns, shapes and sizes... the kind of mental processes that are associated with artistic ability like singing, painting, writing poetry, etc.
Therefore, when these same people are tasked with creating a math test for a "left-brain" subject, this is what you get.
Math and science tests should be written by left-brain people.
Is there any wonder why we are falling behind in the sciences? The kids can't even understand the tests!
Actually it was 15. And most came from one family.
Are they being shown the analytical techniques needed to answer these questions, or otherwise being given a frame of reference within which the questions make sense? A colleague's 7-year-old, for example, recently asked him to help the kid with his math homework. When he couldn't make heads or tails of the questions (despite an EE degree), he Googled the context, figured out how the teaching model worked and within 15 minutes, knew how to explain the material.
Here, the author has an agenda and doesn't ask questions that don't support the agenda. It's possible that this article may itself make a good Common Core question, should Analytical Rhetoric be deemed part of the curriculum.
FWIW, having never had kids, I have no friggin' interest in the Common Core debate one way or the other. But looking through the sample test, I found it pretty interesting and definitely capable of being a valid teaching tool. But the bottom line, as usual, is context. The text can only be evaluated in light of the aspects of the instructional method that complement it. The fact that some jerkoff journalist and his wife can't answer a question in a topic in which they haven't received instruction is irrelevant, and the journalist's assumption that the problem lies with the test, and not with his and his wife's ignorance of the subject matter, may be an example of the arrogance of not knowing enough to know what one doesn't know.
This test paper may (possibly) meet the specification but it is not fit for a class of 5/6/7(?) year old children, or anyone. Throw it away, apologise to the children and parents, get the money back from the company that produced it and use someone else to write the papers.
Anything else is plain ridiculous.
(Oh, since this is the USA, also sue the pants off the company that produced this toxic little waste of time).
A cup is eight ounces.
Of the six objects displayed, the last must make up the difference.
Therefore, we need three more ounces to make a cup.
That notion does not exist. People are "illegal" if they enter and/or remain here in violation of the law. It's a pretty simple concept.
Merely deciding to come to America is irrelevant -- it's the HOW.
Write a subtraction story for 8 - __ = 2. Draw a Picture.
Answer:
Eight kids do a math test, six of them know math, how many of them get the test right?
Picture:
Bad.
to make sure the people of america cannot think at all and must rely on great tv 'programming' to do this for them, we must give them complete gibberish as tests. if somehow they choose the correct responses, we can give them a gibberish award.
we are finished dumbing down america, now its time to make sure they never get smart.
I do not think this particular test is ridiculous, and it certainly cannot be used to invalidate the ideas behind the Common Core curriculum. My 6.5-year-old son is in first grade and I am sure he and his classmates can pass this test. I do grant that the first question is not exactly clear. However, the rest of the questions, including #12 which allegedly stumped a teacher who teaches calculus, seem reasonable to me.
One major problem with pre-college education in the U.S. is the low academic expectation we have of our kids, while placing undue emphasis on unimportant things like sports. The article cites the education system in Finland multiple times, as if that would help justify oppositions against this test or the Common Core. But the author neglects to mention that Finnish kids take schools seriously, as I mentioned in a previous post ( https://plus.google.com/114197560205046387312/posts/Ry7N5uDV1ot ).
D) 1. The test is clearly dealing with subtraction and parts missing vs the whole. That said, why they use the vocabulary they chose, not sure. Can't you teach the word 'equation' to first graders :P. #12 is lousy, though, since the solutions are not represented as equations that use subtraction. The test is TRYING to emulate different ways of saying and encountering subtraction, but still has room for improvement.
I have taken Pearson exams for professional qualifications.
The quality of those is similarly abysmal as the ones mentioned in the article.
I think the problem here is Pearson Education is shit.
Instead of training the youth in how to deal with the world, we make the world incomprehensible to them, dampen their curiosity, instill self-doubt, kill any instinct of achieving the best, then accuse them of all sorts non-existent mental disorders, drug them, threaten them with force and then appear shocked at some of the things they do.
Merely deciding to come to America (unless you're a citizen) will, absent further steps, eventually make you "illegal" - my statement is accurate.
It is absurd that the default outcome of deciding to come to America is being "illegal".
That man has more to answer for than anyone else besides that other pompous git Steve Jobs, for ruining some aspects of our Society.
Reminds me of the Pitman Simplified Spelling, that crippled a generation of poor blighters that could not spell for toffees (or was it tofese?).
They quickly disassociated themselves from any responsibility for getting trendy politically correct namby-pamby "we are all winners" lefty commie school teachers to foist their stupid doctrines and unproven and untested points of views on helpless kids without any way the parents could stop them until it was too late.
Allegedly.
Errors and omissions excepted. I am a man of straw, and so on.
It is now. 15 years ago, it was by 2010. But after that passed with nothing happening, like all the other doomsday predictions, they learned to set dates that are not falsifiable until the people making the predictions have got their pensions.
And similarly, we should be fighting harder the notion that immigration contrary to the established laws is not "illegal".
Note, GP didn't say anything about illegal people. I don't see what's wrong with the expression "illegal immigration" with respect to immigration that is not legal.
But please, continue your efforts to redefine the English language. What do I know, I only became a naturalized citizen in 1989. Legally.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html /thread
why is someone who dropped out of college and never finished what he started telling the department of education what to do.
oh wait nevermind we got to get the kiddies hooked on windows so they know how to do a powerpoint presentation before 4th grade.
No he's right -- the penny was for me. I'm from the Government and I'm here to help.
Somehow I think Pearson is more of the threat in this particular situation. Government is just the tool that the corporation is using.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The idea of the standard (your child should be able to do x) vs. the assessment of the standard is really what is at issue.
This is a horrible assessment. It is poorly written, the questions are structured incorrectly, are vague, and just plain misleading. Number 12 asks for a subtraction "sentence" (equation) for an answer, but only offers addition equations as choices.
If you take the time to look at the underlying mathematical concepts for the questions, provided of course, that you can decipher them, the standards are not unreasonable. Wanting a student to be able to recognize missing addends and be able to write simple addition and subtraction equations is fine.
The test is not fine.
I would consider this an invalid assessment because it is so poorly written. Is this measuring their mathematical understanding? I don't think so, how can it when the students and adults have difficulty understanding the question.
I wouldn't give this to my students without rewriting this test. This is a joke. Right?....Nope....You should see what was on the unit 1 test for PG County MD's 2nd grade quarter 1 unit exam. (I like my paycheck too much to post it)
I work for a firm that analyzes student data and gives recommendations to schools as to which students ought to go in which math classes. The ordinary way this is decided is to give the math teachers full discretion as to who is ready for what. Unfortunately, this is an extremely poor predictive model, and tends to reward students who have absolutely no intention of going into a career which requires math, but are extremely hardworking and do their absolute best on homework and tests, while punishing both lazy computer geeks and most minorities.
This has been going on for about two generations, and has led to the complete subjugation of America's position as the most innovative nation, primarily in the past decade or so. Most or all of the chairs in an advanced math class are filled with people who go on to be doctors, lawyers, marketing consultants, or what have you, NOT engineers, physicists, or mathematicians. This has had tremendous consequences on our economy. The Department of Defence, for instance, has been outsourcing nearly all of their software and cryptography needs to Indian firms, not because they're cheaper (they would pay extra for the ability to 'buy American'), but because there were literally zero qualified American applicants. Even the government outsources, and the private sector has even less incentive to buy American, so... Well, you can imagine.
So, how do we fix this problem? Well, there are two primary goals. 1) Find better algorithms for determining math placement. We've made much progress on this front, with value-added predictive models approaching 99% accuracy with high precision. As an example, SAS's EVAAS software, when the political environment has allowed it to be tested, gives math placement recommendations with the result of nearly doubling the median scores on standardized tests at the end of the year; the students really do belong there, and the teachers did not correctly perceive those students' potential. The teacher unions will continue to lose power and this analytical coup de tat will fill the gap, or we will continue to train the wrong people to compete in the global economy.
The second goal, 2) Find better algorithms for determining content mastery. Once again, the teachers have too much influence. Homework grades, participation grades, minor or major bias in grading, and sometimes even incompetency on the part of the teacher, all conspire to add a randomizing effect to any assessment of students' abilities based on grades and GPAs. We require some sort of standardized curriculum and standardized assessment system, so that we can get enough data to figure out what we should be changing about the way we educate children.
There are a couple added benefits. From the perspective of laize fair capitalism, having the institution which teaches content mastery and the institution which assesses content mastery be the same institution is utterly ludicrous, and will lead to ridiculous market pressures favoring cheating (look what happened in Atlanta, where the a small cabal was able to alter all of the test scores for the whole city). While the politicians aren't exactly the best custodians of the assessment half of education (since they get rotated out so quickly, they are focused heavily on short-term goals), they will perform the job significantly better than the very same teachers who teach the content to be assessed, for the simple fact that there's much less pressure towards dishonest behavior.
Common Core is the first attempt at standardizing the assessment criteria so that the system provides meaningful data instead of pure, opaque noise. I'll be the first to admit it is not a very good system, and in many ways in these early days does more harm than good.
But do not doubt for a second that something *like* Common Core is necessary for the future survival of our Nation.
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
The USA's awful educational system is a competitive advantage for my country!
Burn the heretic!
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Very glad I am adult well past having to deal with taking bullshit tests like this, and also glad I don't have kids who would have to deal with it now.
I keep hearing about how we need to throw more money at education and get kids to spend more time in school. We already put people in school from age 5-ish to their early 20s, longer for specialities. We're already BURNING the prime years of someone's life trying to stuff their heads with junk like this which offers minimal if any actual benefit and usefulness in what will become their everyday life after school. And it takes a huge chunk of years to do it.
Thank you Greece for inventing this system. Great job. Just like everything else Greece has done, it falls into ruins and debt. But great job!
The way we educate is broken. It takes far too long. The material is not nearly useful enough. And it costs too much. These are all areas that need to be improved. Faster, better, cheaper. Unfortunately, the people vested in education -teachers, boards of regents, etc, are all so heavily invested in keeping things as they are (or increasing their power or endowments), nobody will ever step back and evaluate with an open mind and blank sheet of paper what and how we are doing what we do and whether it might make sense to do something different.
Sig for hire.