For many students Standardized Tests don’t measure facts or process.
Standardized tests measure the parents income and education as much as they measure the student’s skills in a particular subject. There is so much debate and literature on this that I’m not even going into it. My purpose here is to show parents, other teachers, and policy makers what MY experience has been, what I did about it, and perhaps influence a few decisions about assessment.
The vast majority of my students had math skills and knowledge far below grade level. Read Part 1 for the statistics. Rather than rehash my earlier arguments let’s look at examples of what I encountered with my 14 to 17 year old, high school, algebra students.
Multiplication of decimals – a 5th grade standard
Suppose you were giving a multiple guess test and you gave the problem:
34.6
x .03
With the following answer choices:
A) 34.4
B) 10.38
C) 1.038
D) 34.9