Take a sample Florida Standards Test! (Common Core)

Florida Standards Assessment ^

[dontreadthis]

The Florida Department of Education on Monday released more information about the state's new series of standardized tests that will replace most of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test next spring. The information, including sample questions, can be viewed at http://www.fsassessments.org

The Education Department wants to hear what the public, particularly teachers, thinks about the sample questions, so there is a comment form on the website, too. The state will take comment through Sept. 5.

The FSA will rely less on multiple-choice questions and more on items that require students to show their work or how they arrived at an answer. The sample questions show that:

Third-graders might have to write a sentence explaining the main idea of a paragraph.

Seventh-graders might have to pull information from both a passage of text and a map to answer a reading-test question

High-school students might be shown grammar and spelling errors in a passage and then have to make corrections.

Fifth-graders, given a worked-out math problem, might have to pinpoint where a mistake was made.

[stormer]

No. I am a hard science academic and the question is to determine if the student can recognize a downward trending scatter plot. It is a completely legitimate question. I just went through and took a look at about half the 12 grade math test and saw nothing unusual. I actually started taking it but the formatting for equations was kind of awkward and I didn’t want to dink around.

[ilovesarah2012]

You can go on it as a guest. I looked at the 6th grade writing test.

[ilovesarah2012]

The answer is always “global warming”.

[Nevadan]

The assumption by most freepers is that common core simply dumbs down the curriculum. In math that is not the case. It actually introduces concepts at much earlier stages. The problem with this is that the curriculum does not build a proper foundation so that most students can fully understand the math processes these are using. Also, while proponents blather on and on about how the cc curriculum promotes and enhances critical thinking, it does the exact opposite. The lines of thinking and terminology used are quite rigid. If one does not think and problem solve using the “correct” method there is a problem. The outcome of all of this is that testing scores overall are going to decline even further. I suggest that those who are reading this article actually take some of the tests.

[BradyLS]

I know folks with kids who are at their wits’ end trying to learn elementary level arithmetic via common core curricula. Parents have no idea how common core works and teachers actively discourage them from trying to help their kids learn math using the old, tried-and-true ways.

If parents can’t look at a problem and show their kids how to solve it—especially if teachers discourage assistance—then then you have the ingredients for a education disaster in the making.

I wonder how many illegals learned common core before breaking the laws to enter the country. I’ll bet their employers don’t care.

[Nevadan]

Re: If parents can’t look at a problem and show their kids how to solve it—especially if teachers discourage assistance—then then you have the ingredients for a education disaster in the making.

Absolutely! And speaking of all the illegal alien children in our schools, if the native born children are having problems with the cc curriculum, we can expect the outcomes for these children to be even worse.

Frankly, I expect that teachers themselves will be increasingly on the forefront of the opposition to common core because they will be held accountable for the negative testing scores, not the educational bureaucrats and politicians who foisted the curriculum on the country.

[Tired of Taxes]

Of interest to both lists...

HOMESCHOOL PING

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL

Metmom holds both the Homeschool and the Another Reason to Homeschool ping lists. I'm merely filling in temporarily.

[DarthDilbert]

[dfwgator]

They took these questions straight from the Florida State University Entrance Exam.

[EODGUY]

In my neck of the woods, the left has changed their mantra to “climate change”. Their propaganda catch phrase was beaten like a rented mule with the record setting harsh winter we experienced in 2013/2014.

I prefer the realistic/conservative explanation.........”weather”.

EODGUY

[cycjec]

I’d be really tempted but ... busy days ahead