Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Common Core Math and Acceleration

I had a AP English teacher who was into existentialist authors. She used to write vocabulary words on the blackboard with extensive definitions of which the student was required to regurgitate verbatim for the test.

She was so anal, she marked off for missing conjunctions.

That's a GREAT explanation of good MCQ validation and monitoring, Colinsmum.

I just didn't have classes large enough that I ever felt that it was statistically feasible to validate things that well. I had to rely upon having a key and my knowledge of which students were in which quintile in order to validate individual questions-- but one thing that I really liked was that I had the evidence right in front of me when that top quintile (or maybe top two quintiles) were approaching a question in a way that I hadn't anticipated.

At least since they weren't scantronned, though, I had the ability to modify credit awarding on the fly to account for my human errors in constructing assessment items.

It is important to note that the barriers may not be personal at all. At least in our district, which just implemented Common Core this fall, one of the issue is that they are literally creating the curriculum barely in time to teach it. For example, in September, they had barely finished the reading/language arts curriculum for first quarter and were just starting to create the curriculum for second quarter so that the teachers literally had no idea beyond the two novels for the first quarter. In math, they also are really changing the curriculum but it is not yet in the teachers' hands. For example, the plan is to incorporate some concepts from 7th through 8th grade math into the 5th grade GT curriculum although the name will likely change next year as GT is not politically correct. Previously, 5th grade GT used the 6th grade curriculum with some enrichment.

Quantum2003 - I understand with common core that they are still writing the curriculum in lots of places, which is an issue. I'm an educator myself though, so I literally spelled out exactly what my DS needed and they ignored it. It's their way or the highway. And their way is driving my DS into a ditch

On multiple choice testing.... I don't mind some MCQ's it's the heavy use of them and without showing your work so a teacher can see why the student got the answer wrong.

Assessments are supposed to help you teach the student better. If all you do is mark 'A' as wrong without knowing why or how the student came to that conclusion, then it's a complete waste of time.