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Goodbye Play-Doh, hello No. 2 pencils.
Because of a tough new curriculum and teacher evaluations, 4-
and 5-year-olds are learning how to fill in bubbles on standardized math tests
to show how much they know about numbers, shapes and order.
Teachers said kindergartners are bewildered. “Sharing is not
caring anymore; developmentally, it’s not the right thing to do,” said one
Queens teacher, whose pupils kept trying to help one another on the math test
she gave for the first time this fall.
The 4- and 5-year-old students are finding the tests
bewildering.
“They’re scared. They just don’t understand you’re supposed to
bubble in next to the answer.”
The state’s teacher ratings, which are in their first year,
require each city school to administer some tests. State exams are usually
administered starting in third grade, but 36 early elementary schools that have
only younger students — in kindergarten through second grade — are required to
give the multiple-choice tests to kids who are just starting school.
Even city schools that aren’t required to test their youngest
kids have begun giving kindergartners similar math tests as part of the Common
Core — the new curriculum that’s supposed to help kids develop higher-order
thinking skills.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Kids are getting upset because they don't understand that
they're meant to bubble in next to the answer.
One of three tests obtained by the Daily News is created by
Pearson — which made the New York State third- through eighth-grade exams,
including a ridiculously worded question about a talking pineapple last year.
Pearson also makes the Common Core materials that most city schools have
recently adopted.
Administering the exams is a complete headache, teachers said.
“They don’t know how to hold pencils,” said a Bronx kindergarten teacher whose
class recently took the Pearson exam. “They don’t know letters, and you have
answers that say A, B, C or D and you’re asking them to bubble in . . . They
break down; they cry.”
The young students are not being allowed to help each other with
the tests, even though they keep trying to do so.
Because the little test-takers don’t know their numbers,
teachers direct them to find each question by an image printed next to the
answers.
Education Department officials insist that the 32 early elementary
schools don’t have to give the kindergarten test yet — though they are required
to administer it by this spring. But officials also acknowledged schools may
not realize they can wait a few months.
At the same time, officials defended the use of multiple choice
as an an easy way for even kindergarten teachers to learn how much their
students know at the beginning of the year.
“Teachers should have access to multiple tools that they can use
in a variety of ways to diagnose what students already know and what they need
help with,” said Nancy Gannon, executive director of academic quality for the
Education Department.
But teachers said testing this way is slow and traumatic. Trying
to get a proper answer was next to impossible. “We said to color it in with a
pencil, so they were taking out crayons,” said a veteran teacher on Staten
Island. “I can tell when a student needs help. I don’t have to give them a
test.”
Try giving these tests to English language learners who arrived in the US just last summer. Many Chinese parents keep or send their children to China until they are eligible to enter kindergarten. Completely inane giving these children a test when they do not understand most of the words used to give the test. I just show them how fill in the little circles. There isn't much else that you can do except think that we live in crazy land.
ReplyDeleteSomeone needs to video tape standard testing of five year olds/
ReplyDelete