No, but I think it was more of a formative assessment than something actually testing them. Perhaps grading it was not so wise. I tend to “check for understanding” and see if I have reached 80% class-comprehension before a big test. I’m guessing class-comprehension was quite low at the point this was given.
From what I saw growing up in the North American educational system in the 60’s and early 70’s:
The “new math” (“maths”?) seems to have been the same artsy-fartsy stuff that you get from anyone who sets out to “fix” something that ain’t broke. Some academics decided that children were precious flowers who need to learn by having everything presented to them and then they discover it for themselves. So they studied for example, how children learned to read and do math and came up with better and totally radical ways to do these. Of course, if you’re making your name as an academic theorist, you can’t study the problem and say “the method that has evolved over hundreds of years is pretty good and only needs a few minor tweaks…”. Instead, they had to come up with something that said “you’ve been doing t all wrong and we need to teach using a completely different method that we’ve just discovered”. As a bonus, it had the effect of saying to parents “we’re the teaching professionals, you amateurs obviously can’t teach this or even understand it; so we need you to stand back and leave the teaching to the degreed professionals.” You would think if “new” math were so self-evident that it is easy to learn, parents would be able to pick it up too. But instead, one of the goals of the designers (subconsciously, I hope) was to make it too confusing for parents.
“Borrow” was the word I learned starting in the early 60’s. I don’t think I ever was concerned by the concept that borrow meant had to return… I think most 7-year-olds understand the idea that sometimes borrowed items don’t get returned to you. (Or more logically, the “return” was in the answer number…)
Whereas somewhere around grade 6 they tried to teach us some “new math” including groups, sets, and rings… perhaps that was interesting, but all it did was guarantee that the average parent was completely unable to help with math.
I recall learning, in K through 12, about sets, number lines, and the concept of bases (base 10, binary, etc.). This was all foreign to my parents, but was invaluable to me when I started learning about computers. I entered my computer science classes in college pre-armed with a lot of the required basic knowledge.
Understanding why we do certain things, as opposed to learning rote procedures, can be very valuable.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me that these new methods are better than the way I learned but the experts apparently think so. I do recall that a lot of my classmates struggled with things like algebra. Maybe these new methods have been found to help those kids.
Things change. knowledge progresses. That includes knowledge about how we learn.
Since this has been rezzed, I’ll give my opinion:
The problem I see is that the instructions have you leave out a step. You first need to group everything into hundreds, tens, and ones, and THEN regroup. If it had been written that way, it would have been much clearer exactly what was desired, as well as encouraging the kid to write all the steps.
Got an answer for this one!
$4.59 - $3.71 = $0.88
Explanation:
$4.59 would be 4 dollars + 2 quarters + 1 nickel + 4 pennies
It’s not possible to take just $3.71 as-is from the cash/coins available.
But if 1 dollar is traded for 10 dimes, I can then take: 3 dollars + 2 quarters + 2 dimes + 1 penny
This will leave me with: 8 dimes + 1 nickel + 3 pennies = $0.88