It's true. With Pearson gone (sort of) QUestar has released 75% of this year's test questions for the public to view. While they haven't yet included the answers nor breakdown of how students did on each question across the state, I suppose you could be a tad thankful they released something. (?)
Yesterday, I sat down to look at the 5th grade math questions during my prep and found myself working through lunch and “taking” the whole test.
I’m a fairly decent math thinker and have successfully taught scores of 5th graders the underlying concepts. But I had trouble with some of the questions.
Sure, I could have looked at my teaching notes, and spent a little more time puzzling through the difficult problems, (they’re challenging but not impossible questions,) but the point is, our students take these tests under pressure (even if they’re un-timed,) and the answers just shouldn’t be so elusive. I understand throwing in a few questions to challenge the stronger students, but there were many challenging questions that frankly didn’t make much sense if the goal is to see how proficient students are, overall, with the math standards. And if the goal is to test the supposed “effectiveness” of teachers, then this post could most definitely be even longer…
Question # 9 requiring students to know the “trick” of how to divide fractions is the one that sticks in my craw the most. The State’s own declaration of what Shifts in Focus the CCSS are supposed to lead to include “deep comprehension” of topics and not merely learning/teaching “tricks.”
While it’s true that a truly astute student might know or remember that a whole number divided by a fraction is a whole number, including a problem like “56 divided by 1/17” is ridiculous. (For those not familiar with fifth grade math, this is the first year they work with division of fractions. It’s an incredibly complex concept to understand with “deep comprehension” so to create a test problem like this one pretty much forces teachers to teach the trick of “Keep, change, flip.” Then the answer is simple. And math short-cuts and tricks will surely remain the safety net for teachers and students. Maybe that is all for the best…)
Maybe I misunderstood the intention of all the new math standards and the underlying focus on “deeply understanding mathematical concepts.”
What do I know? I’m just a 5th grade teacher.
I always think of that old adage that a horse created by a committee often turns into a camel. When our district jumped onto the test-fanatic bandwagon, we pushed so many suddenly created tests onto our children that it was always possible to find (1) ridiculous questions, (2) ambiguous questions, (3) non-logical questions, and (4) questions made nonfunctional due to typos. Yet the solution to this problem was always, each and every time: Here's the answer sheet; THIS IS THE ANSWER. Period.
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