^ A beginning of year first grade assessment is a test to assess how much the kids in the class know. Where did this come from? It comes from a public school in NYC. I got it from a parent of a first grade student.
I’m not sure if it’s shoddy curriculum as much as it is poor teacher/parent communication. At least around here, 1st graders don’t have textbooks they take home, which would easily show parents what these instructions mean. Instead, all they have are photocopied worksheets with instructions written in jargon that makes the actual goal illusive.
You’re parsing it wrong. It’s a (beginning of year) (first grade assessment). In other words, it’s a test they take in first grade, at the beginning of the year. The purpose is to find out where the students are starting from, so the teacher can tailor the instruction appropriately.
Honestly, it’s not that different from work my kids did in first/second grade at their public school in CT. My son is a junior in college now and my daughter a high school senior, so it was awhile ago.
Frankly, I rarely felt I needed to understand the methodology to the point I could help them too much on their homework. What I mean is, if they couldn’t come home and do it based on classroom instruction, that was something the teacher needed to know. If I didn’t get it and my kid didn’t get it, the solution was to write a note telling the teacher that help was needed. I rarely got too concerned if I wasn’t 100% sure what the directions were specifically going for, and I could usually get a good response from the teacher when we were truly perplexed.
Looking back at this, I realize writing it “should be obvious” sounds a bit obnoxious. What I meant by this is the teacher should have made it clear to students what this wording is asking them to do when the concept was taught, not that knowing the method makes this wording obvious.
Of course, this is what makes the instructions so problematic. The kids who understand aren’t the ones who need help, and the ones who need help probably aren’t going to be able to explain the instructions to their parents, leaving kids and parents frustrated.
Wait, are you telling me that it was given to first-graders at the beginning of the school year? What? Are kids supposed to already know how to read before they enter the first grade? Are they that far beyond what I know of? I thought that they weren’t expected to have necessarily learned anything in kindergarten except maybe how to count to ten and the alphabet. Are you saying that they’re supposed to be able to read those sentences (which, as I said above, look to me to be about the level appropriate to a third grader)?
Now it’s possible, I suppose, that this was an evaluation of the level of knowledge of those entering the first grade which didn’t assume that all or even most of the students would be able to do well on it. For example, a school might decide that each first-grader takes an I.Q. test or a reading-level test at the beginning of the year so that the school can discover that a new student is far beyond the level of first grade and might be allowed to skip a grade or two. If, for instance, such tests show that the new first grader has an I.Q. of 160 and reads at the level of the average high school senior, that’s useful knowledge for the school.
But if this page comes from a test given by the school for its own purposes, why would a parent ever see it? Students don’t take home the I.Q. or reading-level tests that they are given in school to show to their parents. The school might decide to discuss the I.Q.'s or the reading-level scores with the parents if they are particularly high or low, but they don’t give the tests themselves to the parents. Why would a parent ever see something that’s merely used for a school to evaluate the level at which a student begins the year?
Furthermore, if this is a beginning-of-the-year evaluation, why does it include terminology from a specific and fairly new way of explaining math to students? When were the students suppose to have learned this terminology? Were they supposed to have learned it in kindergarten? Were they have supposed to have been taught this terminology by their parents as they learned to speak?
First of all, for an assessment like this, it’s not expected that the kids will already be able to do it. It’s expected that some of the kids will maybe be expected to do it. That’s the whole point: You don’t know what the students already know, and so you need to find out.
Second, you’re assuming that the kids were supposed to read the instructions, but while some of them might be able to read, that would be covered under a different test. Presumably, the teacher (or possibly an aide of some sort) would be reading these questions to the kids.
Why would children bring home a test with instructions that they can’t read themselves and that the teacher has read to them? Again, this is of no use to the parents. It’s just a test for the use of the school where the school knows very well that most children won’t be able to answer the questions correctly. Indeed, my suspicion is that almost no children will be able to answer the questions correctly. This whole thread has been deceptive. We were lead to believe that first graders can answer questions like the ones in the test. Clearly, they can’t.
It’s a baseline test to get a sense of the range of abilities. It also tells you if your teaching strategies work- have the students improved after you taught them?
Students do baseline tests in writing and reading as well. Often it will help the teacher identify who needs special help and who might benefit from more challenging work.
At parent-teacher conferences in the primary years we see a portfolio of work. I see where my son or daughter started and how they progressed and examples of their work. This is more meaningful than just a grade on a report card. Much of the work is sent home for us to see how they are doing and see how they’ve progressed. It’s not a secret.
For the reasons stated above. Much curriculum “loops”- a concept may be introduced in a small way in a previous grade and then really explored later. Chances are they have already discussed this a bit before they see the baseline test. Even if they have not- that is the point of a baseline- to see what they are familiar with coming in and what they learned during the school year. I do this in my college classes- on some complex ideas I see what they know prior to the unit starting and how they score after to assess if my teaching approach is effective.
What makes you think that a student brought the test home, and what makes you think that anyone expected the students to get them all right?
x-ray vision says in post #21 that he got it from the parent of a first grader. That means that the first grader brought the test home and gave it to the parent. I didn’t say that the children were expected to get all the answers right. What I was saying was that w-ray vision seemed to imply that a student was expected to get a lot of the questions right if the student followed what was going on in class. Again, this was stated in post #21 to be a beginning-of-the-year assessment for first graders. That means that it is expected that the children will almost always know nothing about arithmetic except what they have learned in kindergarten and what parents usually teach their children at home (i.e., things like the alphabet and counting to ten or so). Even if the teacher reads the test questions to the student, I don’t understand how any of them, other than a few super-bright ones, can understand the questions at the beginning of first grade.
The corrrect answer is whichever way the pupils have been taught to approach the problem. Those taking the test have been drilled over and over again to do it a certain way. The way they have been taught is the right way. All ways they have not been taught is the wrong way. The same problem has appeared in their homework workbooks repeatedly. They are required to do it the same way.
Neither logic, common sense, nor a correct solution are relevant in the scoring.
And what way is that, if they’re taking it at the beginning of first grade?
It could mean that. It could also mean that the parent saw it at a parent-teacher conference where they were discussing how the student did on the test. It could mean that the parent heard the kid talking about the test, and went to the school to see what it was all about. It could mean that it’s been going around the e-mail lists that the parent receives, and might have originally made it onto that list by the school janitor sneaking into the storeroom. There are many ways the test could have gotten into the parents’ hands.
Come on, far less than 1% of beginning first grade students, even East Asian first grade students, are going to be able to solve that problem.
You have a scientific PhD, don’t you? God I wish I was that smart, and I am not being sarcastic. You need to bear in mind that your math aptitude is so much greater than average that math problems which seemed easy to you, throughout your life, are impossible for most people to solve.
People like you would help less gifted people like me more if you set our bar a lot lower than OP, and helped contribute to ways for people like me to climb a lower bar. We might still be able to support ourselves using math if reasonable goals (“bars”) are set for us during our education in the subject.
The answer is that I’m glad I’m not I first grade now. I do arithmetic in my head pretty easily because I see the numbers mentally. That said, I hopefully could have learned it if it had been presented to me that way 45 years ago. Part of me thinks it would have made my math phobia begin earlier than it did. Good thing I didn’t pass my math genes down; oldest son is taking linear algebra and multivariable calculus in HS. No, I don’t have any idea what that means.
I remember taking tests like this at the start of every grade. There’s questions that they know none of the kids would get and questions they knew all of the kids would get. I mean look at the next question. It’s barely a step above “put these shapes in the right hole.” The whole point is to figure out what the average student knows, and also to figure who might need a little help and who might be ahead of everyone else.
Terrible question. 15-5-2 are steps illustrated, 15-5 makes the ten asked for in the question.
I suspect that the percentage is much higher than you’d expect. Certainly, most kids are expected to be able to solve that problem by the end of first grade, and there will be some who’ve had exposure to the techniques before then (maybe they had a very ambitious kindergarten teacher, or maybe they have an older sibling who passes it down).
But even if it is only the top 1% who could get it, what’s wrong with that? You need some questions like that, if the test is to be useful. How else would you tell the difference between a student in the 99th percentile from one in the 98th percentile? For a well-designed test, that tells you as much as possible about the students (which is after all the purpose of tests), the average score should be 50%.
That’s perhaps the intended score for a test that is designed to rank and compare students - a norm-referenced test. For a criterion-referenced test, one which is designed to see whether students have mastered certain material, that is not the ideal score - on those types of tests, you’re typically okay with all students scoring well if it means, accurately, that the material has been mastered by the vast majority of students.
Also, test questions for which only 1% of students get it correct is probably NOT useful; there is typically little need for a single question to distinguish between the 99th and 98th percentile (or, for that matter, the 1st and 2nd percentiles). Unless the test is extremely long (in which case it has other issues), there is typically a better use for the limited number of questions available on a test than making such a fine distinction.