Who is refusing Common Core tests for 3rd-8th graders?

[Jeannie]

http://epat-parcc.testnav.com/client/index.html#tests

PARCC practice tests are here. 5th grade math is pretty intense. Teachers cannot give any help. That includes not being able to reword directions, or help with technology (for example, which icon to click to be able to enter a fraction.)

 

[nugov2]

http://epat-parcc.testnav.com/client/index.html#tests

PARCC practice tests are here. 5th grade math is pretty intense. Teachers cannot give any help. That includes not being able to reword directions, or help with technology (for example, which icon to click to be able to enter a fraction.)

I don't dispute that their are districts who feel that way, but there are also a lot who feel the opposite. This whole week I have seen a lot of people posting on FB stating that their kids have said how easy the test were so far. I gave my 2nd grader the 3rd grade practice test and he was fine with it. Our district begins typing and computers in K. They have the technology skills needed to not have that be a factor in how well they do on the test. I do think there are districts who have no business taking the online version of the test, but have decided to anyway(for budget reasons it sounds) and that is where I think the mistakes have been made. Districts knew this was coming down the pipe and should have done what they needed to do sooner if they were adopting it and the government needs to recognize all of the states ill prepared and extended the deadlines. There is a lot of wrong going on with this implementation and the blame doesn't just fall on the fact that the test is different from what we have seen before.

 

[Kenny1113]

That isn't CC doing, but your district. Our district doesn't teach math in a certain way. They present many ways to solve math problems. It is a red flag that your son is bored in the gifted program. It might be that the teachers need to look at the lessons they are teaching and revamp them. Fads in teaching sadly have always been the way, but it is how each district deals with the fad is what is important. You don't have to change a lot of what you are doing to meet these fads if the district takes the time to sit down and do what is right for their students vs quickly adopting a new program with little research and effort.

Thanks for this info. i didn't know that. I will no longer lump this madness into common core.

Unfortunately I have spoken to his teacher about it but nothing has changed. She even agreed and understood how/why he would be bored. Said he has to put in a lot less effort in math than most of the kids in his class do- just to pass.

I have him do khan academy so he can do higher grade level math.


I do like that they have to read different passages and come up with an opinion and cute the reason.(is this cc or district??) I like that they get them ready for this thinking.

I'm just curious at what point will they be taught to evaluate the source, hopefully they don't wait until college.

 

[Kenny1113]

I don't dispute that their are districts who feel that way, but there are also a lot who feel the opposite. This whole week I have seen a lot of people posting on FB stating that their kids have said how easy the test were so far. I gave my 2nd grader the 3rd grade practice test and he was fine with it. Our district begins typing and computers in K. They have the technology skills needed to not have that be a factor in how well they do on the test. I do think there are districts who have no business taking the online version of the test, but have decided to anyway(for budget reasons it sounds) and that is where I think the mistakes have been made. Districts knew this was coming down the pipe and should have done what they needed to do sooner if they were adopting it and the government needs to recognize all of the states ill prepared and extended the deadlines. There is a lot of wrong going on with this implementation and the blame doesn't just fall on the fact that the test is different from what we have seen before.

Our district was not prepared. The computer systems could not handle the testing (there have been multiple explanations as to why, I'm not sure which are fact v fiction) and much of the middle school testing was postponed.

 

[Jeannie]

duplicate

 

[Jeannie]

I don't dispute that their are districts who feel that way, but there are also a lot who feel the opposite. This whole week I have seen a lot of people posting on FB stating that their kids have said how easy the test were so far. I gave my 2nd grader the 3rd grade practice test and he was fine with it. Our district begins typing and computers in K. They have the technology skills needed to not have that be a factor in how well they do on the test. I do think there are districts who have no business taking the online version of the test, but have decided to anyway(for budget reasons it sounds) and that is where I think the mistakes have been made. Districts knew this was coming down the pipe and should have done what they needed to do sooner if they were adopting it and the government needs to recognize all of the states ill prepared and extended the deadlines. There is a lot of wrong going on with this implementation and the blame doesn't just fall on the fact that the test is different from what we have seen before.

Our school, students and teachers, felt that the 3rd grade tests were easy. 4th was said to be rather difficult. 5th grade starts testing next week. Our students have the technology skills. That is not the issue. The issue is with all of the 'tools', icons, 'exhibits' specific to PARCC. My concern is that not all of the students are going to remember how to use all of these or even where they are located!

 

[nugov2]

Thanks for this info. i didn't know that. I will no longer lump this madness into common core.

Unfortunately I have spoken to his teacher about it but nothing has changed. She even agreed and understood how/why he would be bored. Said he has to put in a lot less effort in math than most of the kids in his class do- just to pass.

I have him do khan academy so he can do higher grade level math.


I do like that they have to read different passages and come up with an opinion and cute the reason.(is this cc or district??) I like that they get them ready for this thinking.

I'm just curious at what point will they be taught to evaluate the source, hopefully they don't wait until college.

OT but another good math problem is Stanfords EPGY program. My dd loves it.

Our school, students and teachers, felt that the 3rd grade tests were easy. 4th was said to be rather difficult. 5th grade starts testing next week. Our students have the technology skills. That is not the issue. The issue is with all of the 'tools', icons, 'exhibits' specific to PARCC. My concern is that not all of the students are going to remember how to use all of these or even where they are located!

My dd is taking the 4th one and says they are easy. It will be interesting to see how it goes from year to year. That is a valid concern for sure about the tools. At my dd's school they did a practice test and did a scavenger hunt game to learn all of the tools they will need/see.

 

[Ceila]

n/m

 

[IDoDis]

This is an actual practice question from the Common Core M-Step test in Michigan. I dare anyone to find the "right" answers:

I'd say the answers are e and f. One only needs to look at the topic sentence to see which choices support it. Would I have figured that out when I was a 5th grader? I doubt it. I had to read the question twice to understand what was being asked. The question was poorly worded.

Our 5th graders would get that easily.

We finished up testing this week. 3 days of 1.5 hours each. The general reaction of the kids. "wow, that was easy." Most were finished long before the allowed time. Our teachers did very little practice for the test.

But our teachers do focus on critical thinking year round, so our 5th graders would not have a problem with that at all.

Ding, ding, ding!!! This is The Dis, after all. Of course there are going to be kids that will find the tests easy, but most will not. The overall tone I feel from comments like this is that their schools teach better. I doubt it. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts your school is not in an area of poverty and that the students come from homes of mostly educated, involved parents who care about their kids' education. That is what makes the difference. If teachers switched schools from an affluent school with a grade level of teachers from a high poverty school, the scores at each school would be the same plus or minus a few points. In other words, the teacher at the more affluent school (who used to teach at the less affluent school) would have higher test scores than the teacher at the less affluent school (who used to teach at the high affluent school) if they switched schools for a year.

 

[Happy Snowman]

It's just not naturally the way people think. It's like those hidden information questions people post on Facebook. See if you can figure out the answer in 30 seconds, only 5% of people get this right. It's not an accurate test of what they learn- or what you ever learned, apparently. How old are you?

The kids would not have the opportunity to explain "why" they didn't get it right. They would just get it wrong.

There will be questions on the test, like all standardized tests, that maybe only 5% of the takers will get. Just like the ACT/SAT, most students do NOT get all of the answers right. It's designed that way on purpose. It is a valid question to have on the test. It isn't testing what they know, but how they can wade through extraneous information to get to the right answer. I just had to take a test for work, probably half the questions on the test were similar to this and it does make you stretch what you normally do to get past the extra info to figure out the answer, but guess what, I have to do that every day at work too. No, I'm not in 5th grade, but that is about the age where kids brains start to develop to be able to work through that type of problem so they are looking for those 5% that can already.

 

[kimmar067]

....about 7 or 8 of our 7th grade students are not taking the test....next week is 8th grade testing...I will find out then how many are not....

 

[kimmar067]

Insay the answers are e and f. One only needs to look at the topic sentence to see which choices support it. Would I have figured that out when I was a 5th grader? I doubt it. I had to read the question twice to understand what was being asked. The question was poorly worded.



Ding, ding, ding!!! This is The Dis, after all. Of course there are going to be kids that will find the tests easy, but most will not. The overall tone I feel from comments like this is that their schools teach better. I doubt it. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts your school is not in an area of poverty and that the students come from homes of mostly educated, involved parents who care about their kids' education. That is what makes the difference. If teachers switched schools from an affluent school with a grade level of teachers from a high poverty school, the scores at each school would be the same plus or minus a few points. In other words, the teacher at the more affluent school (who used to teach at the less affluent school) would have higher test scores than the teacher at the less affluent school (who used to teach at the high affluent school) if they switched schools for a year....

....I have also heard that the Algebra part of the high school test was extremely difficult...our principal's son is in a 10th grade Honors class and he could not answer many of the questions...

 

[sam_gordon]

....I have also heard that the Algebra part of the high school test was extremely difficult...our principal's son is in a 10th grade Honors class and he could not answer many of the questions...

So is the problem with the test or with what is being taught?

Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's necessarily bad.
Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's necessarily good.

I'm sure we (PARCC, Pearman, whoever) could design a test that 100% of students would pass. Is that helpful though? By the same token, a test shouldn't be designed for 0% to pass.

 

[jodifla]

Big Brother is alive and well: PARCC is monitoring students social media accounts and pushing for punishment if they talk about the PARCC test. And then a news blogger who published even the fact that Pearson was doing this had his blog site go down; it looks like it has been hacked:

Pearson, the world’s largest education company, is monitoring social media during the administration of the new PARCC Common Core test to detect any security breaches, and a spokeswoman said that it was “obligated” to alert authorities when any problems were discovered.

The superintendent of a New Jersey school district wrote an e-mail to colleagues (see below) about the monitoring, saying that she found the practice “a bit disturbing.”



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...a-for-security-breaches-during-parcc-testing/

 

[jodifla]

So is the problem with the test or with what is being taught?

Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's necessarily bad.
Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's necessarily good.

I'm sure we (PARCC, Pearman, whoever) could design a test that 100% of students would pass. Is that helpful though? By the same token, a test shouldn't be designed for 0% to pass.

You've already seen the results from your own state, year after year after year now. The test scores remain low, with minimal improvement, despite the heavy spin on those numbers. The schools whose children come from wealthier districts do well, the poorer districts do poorly -- just as they have always done, almost universally, since there has been standardized testing.

And since the tests give students, parents and teachers results like 1, 2, 3, 4 -- when they are already in the next grade -- they don't provide any meaningful feedback. They are not diagnositc: They reward the haves, and punish the have-nots.

They are garbage, and it's stunning we are wasting such resources on them.

 

[jodifla]

Here are more test questions, this time for 8th grade ELA. I thought these were OK actually and most adults would get them right; although I'm not sure how a 13 year old would approach them. My bet would be that really strong students would ace these, and others would really struggle. Also, if you had a lot of these passages, you'd feel rushed. For those who want to try, you can bubble in the answers and hit submit to see if you got them right.

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/...e-english-questions-can-you-answer-1.10056747

 

[Jeannie]

This is the PARCC practice site. It has practice tests for language arts and math for the different grade levels.

http://parcc.pearson.com/practice-tests/

 

[Ceila]

Big Brother is alive and well: PARCC is monitoring students social media accounts and pushing for punishment if they talk about the PARCC test. And then a news blogger who published even the fact that Pearson was doing this had his blog site go down; it looks like it has been hacked:

Pearson, the world’s largest education company, is monitoring social media during the administration of the new PARCC Common Core test to detect any security breaches, and a spokeswoman said that it was “obligated” to alert authorities when any problems were discovered.

The superintendent of a New Jersey school district wrote an e-mail to colleagues (see below) about the monitoring, saying that she found the practice “a bit disturbing.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...a-for-security-breaches-during-parcc-testing/

Yeah, this news is blowing up in NJ. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

On one hand, companies monitor social media all the time. I see nothing wrong with Pearson, or any other testing agency, watching social media for references to test questions. And, if the author made his/her identity fairly obvious (name, referencing a particular school, etc.), then I don't fault them for using publicly available information to maintain test security. On the other hand, if the identifying information took some sleuthing to get, then yes, I'd have an issue with it.

What I haven't seen is what exactly was in the tweet, and I haven't read how it was determined who sent it. I'd like to know that information before really deciding what I think about it all.

 

[Tinijocaro]

Yeah, this news is blowing up in NJ. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

On one hand, companies monitor social media all the time. I see nothing wrong with Pearson, or any other testing agency, watching social media for references to test questions. And, if the author made his/her identity fairly obvious (name, referencing a particular school, etc.), then I don't fault them for using publicly available information to maintain test security. On the other hand, if the identifying information took some sleuthing to get, then yes, I'd have an issue with it.

What I haven't seen is what exactly was in the tweet, and I haven't read how it was determined who sent it. I'd like to know that information before really deciding what I think about it all.

This is a huge deal. So kids can't talk about the tests? Pearson wanted the boy disciplined. The school refused. The tweet did not reveal content, and it wasn't a photo. What else could he have written that would require such secrecy? With the billions this company is making, you think they could use new questions for each time the test is administered instead of stalking students on social media and expecting silence.

 

[jodifla]

This is a huge deal. So kids can't talk about the tests? Pearson wanted the boy disciplined. The school refused. The tweet did not reveal content, and it wasn't a photo. What else could he have written that would require such secrecy? With the billions this company is making, you think they could use new questions for each time the test is administered instead of stalking students on social media and expecting silence.

Pearson has taken down its website on its TRACX system which monitors everything being said about it and its tests.