More on the Common Core Exam

So here is the breakdown of how the District explains my problem with the scoring in the math portion of our Common Core Exam.

Math

Emergent                      Approaches                   Meets

.00-120.49                  120.50-161.49                161.50-169.00

Those are points possible on the test and how they broke them down.

Counting to 100 has a point value of – 101 (since we start at zero)

Skip counting to 100 from 0 equals - 11 points

Writing numbers from 0-21 equals - 21 points

Counting objects – 10 points

Comparing numbers - 5 points

Addition and subtraction -  5 points (listen to a number story, and correctly write a number sentence and do the math)

Recognise and name 2 and 3 D objects in the environment.  -8 points

 Use correct terms to describe objects location - 8 points

Clearly someone with a math background did not decide how to score this test.  Do they REALLY want to disproportionately value rote counting that much over the other standards?  Counting by ones to 100 and skip counting by 10′s to 100 is 122 of the points or 72% of all possible points.  Two of the eight standards assessed account for 72% of the score.  That’s not right.  Next year I should allocate 72% of my math time to those two standards.

The girl in my previous post scored a total of 119 points because of only counting to 49.  She would still have had to count to 92 to meet the standard.  In my experience, if they can count to 92, they can count to 100.

And they scored it differently for ELA .  There were 15 standards evaluated in ELA.  If a student got maximum points on all standards except words, and they met the standard with words at 50 words they would earn 179 points.  If they miss 7.51 points out of 179 points, they drop from Meeting the Standard to Approaches the Standard.  That is such a narrow margin.

They gave us a list of 100 high frequency words for the kids to learn.  If they learned 49 they approach the Standard,  50 words they meet the standard, 51 or higher, they exceed the Standard.  Knowing the extra words can really skew the result of the ELA portion of the test.

Common Core State Standards and Merit Pay

Our district, along with the rest of the country, is inching towards merit pay.  One of the steps they have put in place this year is a Common Core State Standard assessment.  In kindergarten, since there is no baseline data, we have to administer the assessment four times a year.  Once at the very beginning of the year, the first week, before we even have routines and procedures down.  Then we do it three more times at the end of each grading period.   Testing.

We have just finished up the final, end of year CCSS exam.  Our principal wanted us to pull a report from the program where we record our results.  The data became available over the weekend and I looked at it.  Basically, the “Big Picture” report takes all of the math standard results, and all of the ELA results and condenses them into one math “grade” and one ELA “grade”.  The grades are, Emergent, Approaches, Meets, and Exceeds.

Fine,  except for this, and it’s only one example.  I have one little girl, who “meets” the standard on EVERY Common Core State Standard in math except one.  She can’t count to 100 yet,  she  only counted to 49.  She is rated as Emergent on this one standard.  Eight standards tested, 7 out of 8 meeting the standards but that’s not enough.  Because she was rated Emergent on this ONE standard, she is rated Emergent on ALL of math.  That’s not right.

In reading, they have to know 50 out of 100 sight words to meet the standard, 49 is approaching the standard, 50 meets the standard, and 51 exceeds.  There is no wiggle room.  Knowing 35 words is still Emergent and knowing 35 words gets the same rating as knowing 6 words.

District Trimester Assessments

Near the end of each grading period we give a test, which is correlated to the state standards, to see how our kids are doing.  The state standards are broken down by trimester as well, so it’s pretty specific which content is supposed to be covered and when.

I finished the Language Arts portion of the test today.  We need to have the completed scantrons bubbled in and turned in by Dec. 2nd.  At least they don’t expect kindergarten kids to be able to bubble in an answer sheet yet…..  Of course the flip side of that is that WE have to bubble in their answers, and with 31 kids, that’s a bunch of bubbles.  Since I don’t want to wait until mid Dec. for the results, I quickly graded them and entered their scores into an Excel spreadsheet.  For Language Arts, they evaluated on three state standards this time, letter recognition, initial sound/letter identification, and high frequency words, four questions on each standard.  Twenty-two of my kids missed two or fewer questions and would be considered as being  ”Low Risk”.  That’s the good news.  ONE student could be considered as “Some Risk” with seven correct, and the remaining eight students would be considered “High Risk” getting five or fewer questions correct. 

There is such a huge disparity between the two groups.  And the sad thing is that the school’s intervention focus isn’t on the lower eight, it’s on the “Some Risk” group, where the interventions actually seem to be working.  But without significant interventions with those lower eight students, the disparity will only grow.   Then I always feel badly for the higher kids, they get neglected.  No Child Left Behind, has almost mandated that we focus on those “middle” kids and try to bring them up, because they should be the easiest ones to lift.   The middle gets the most help, not the lowest, neediest.  All of the school’s emphasis is on these middle kids, yet somehow, at some point, we as teachers are going to be held accountable for those lower kids.

Which brings me to another point, if the United States of America is to remain competitive in a global market, if we have to put our focus someplace, we need to be focusing on the brightest and the best of our kids, not the middle.  I’ve seen data that says there are more genius level IQ’s in China, than we have PEOPLE in the U.S.  We had better be doing a good job with the talent we have, not ignoring them while we focus on the middle.  We are pursuing a path of mediocrity.

Dibels

I have finally finished my dibels beginning benchmark assessments.  I have 6 Benchmarked, 11 Strategic, and 15 Intensive.  As much of a struggle as this class has been, they are starting out higher overall than my class last year.  The scary thing is that 20 kids didn’t know a single letter on the letter naming fluency part.

Dibels and the 7th day of school

Tthe testing window for the beginning of the year dibels benchmarks opens tomorrow.  I have all of the kids uploaded to my Palm so I can begin the testing.  Now, I just have to figure out how to keep the rest of the kids busy and out of trouble while I’m doing it. 

The problem is, that while they make improvements daily, they still don’t have routines and procedures down pat yet, and they really can’t do much, only about a third of my kids can write their first names good enough for me to be able to read them, and they can’t do much else.  Most of them haven’t grasped the idea of phonemic awareness yet,  and they aren’t very good at sorting beginning sound pictures for the letters Bb and Cc (the only ones we have done so far).   So I hate to interrupt the routines and procedures for a week while we do dibels.  About the time that the dibels window closes the mclass math window opens……….

I know it’s the beginning of the year and I say this almost every year but, this group sure seems low this year.  And I know for a fact that I thought that last year and they turned out to be my best ever class at reading by the end of the year.    I’ve got some squirrelly ones this year…….

Reading: “The Daily 5″

Apparently  this book,  “The Daily 5“  is going to be the framework for our language arts next year.  I have the book, and I’ve started to read it, but I’m having a little trouble figuring out how to bring it down to kindergarten, at the beginning of the year, when they don’t even know letters and sounds yet.  Anyone out there familiar with this system?  The author’s website.

Between the highest and the lowest

There is a widening gape between the highest performing kids in my room and the lowest performing kids.  We just finished our middle benchmark dibels testing and generally they did very well. 

At the beginning of the year, I had:

 11 Intensive children

 14 Strategic

4 Benchmark kids.

Now I have:

2 Intensive

10 Strategic

18 Benchmark

8 of my Intensive kids moved up, half of them went from Intensive to Benchmark, and 10 kids went from Strategic to Benchmark.

So for the last couple of days I have been adjusting and differentiating their centers and seatwork along the new data.  Today about killed some of them.  Based on the data from the tests I divided them into groups and gave out assignments that I thought they could do.

Yeah, we’ll have to make some adjustments.  Some of them were totally lost with the new work, some of them could DO it, they just didn’t LIKE it.  And it’s really interesting to see how they react to change and to new challenges.  A couple of them just shut down, and didn’t even try the new stuff, and when I worked them through a couple of examples, it was clear that they had the necessary skills, just didn’t like it.  Thinking is hard work and some of their little thinking machines have never really had to do much.

Hopefully, these changes will allow me to deal with small groups better, small group instruction has been pretty rocky with this class so far this year.

Teaching Reading

Over at Writing Every Day Works,  Debra has a link to Mem Fox’s website, and I thoroughly enjoyed Mem Fox’s writing on learning to read.  She makes some really good points about what works and what doesn’t and about how sometimes we aren’t asking the right questions, or we make the wrong assumptions.

The odd thing about all the apparently different methods I’ve mentioned is that they all share the same foundation: a cognitive, that is brain-orientated, view of learning to be literate. For example, (to simplify complex arguments) the Phonics Followers believe that little bits of words have to be taught before whole words can be grasped, let alone whole texts. The Whole-Word or Look-and-Say Apostles believe that it’s easier to read words than bits of words and that the reading of words must precede the reading of whole texts. The Whole Language Enthusiasts believe it’s easier to start with meaningful whole texts, then to work backwards to individual words and then back even further to bits of words and individual letters.

All the above methods focus on the page, not on the child or its teacher. All isolate themselves from the environment in which a particular child finds itself. All ignore the relationship between the child and the person teaching that child to read. All presume that the cognitive text and the cognitive method supersede the affective, that is the heart-orientated circumstances which surround the act of learning to read. The reason is obvious.

In the current (if changing) climate, in which quantitative educational research rates more highly than qualitative research, it’s not surprising that the affective is virtually forgotten. Matters affecting the heart are far more elusive than those affecting the mind. There’s no simple way to measure the role of the affective in teaching children to read. It can’t be recorded in numbers. It can’t be caught in a statistical net. It can’t be pre-tested or post-tested. Its subjects can’t be divided into control groups because the affective aspects of any given situation are unique to the situation at the moment of its happening and cannot be replicated. Measuring such indefinables as the effects of expectations, happiness, eagerness, fondness, laughter, admiration, hope, humiliation, abuse, tiredness, racism, hunger, loneliness and love on the development of literacy is so difficult, even within ethnographic research, that to my knowledge it is attempted rarely.

You can read the whole article here.

Our New Reading and Writing Motto in our class:

Got this at a district kindergarten inservice last week, it’s going up on our wall in the classroom.

If you can think it, you can say it.

If you can say it, you can write it.

If you can write it, you can read it.

Student Writing in Kindergarten

I was doing my lesson plans tonight and I had to interact with this calendar of writing prompts from my school.  I get so irritated I want to spit every time I look at it.  First off, it’s just too broad of an age spread to combine K-2nd grade.  Note the current prompt for my kids:  

Explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Give two examples of each.

Never mind that our current science unit is FABRIC…….  My kids can hardly put the sentence together, “I like (insert something here)”   I would have to do a whole unit on solids, liquids and gases just to get to the point where we could put a sentence together.  THEY WANT TWO EXAMPLES OF EACH.  That is so ludicrous that it defies words.  I’ll  just shut up now……..

Writing Prompts

2009 – 2010

K – 2^nd Grade 

9/8/09 – 9/11/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
9/21/09 – 9/25/09	My favorite holiday is _______ because…
10/6/09 – 10/9/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
10/19/09 – 10/23/09	In a letter to the President, persuade him to change a law of your choice.
11/3/09 – 11/6/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
11/16/09 – 11/20/09	Explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Give two examples of each.
11/30/09 – 12/4/10	Think about what you like to do the most. Write a paper telling what you enjoy doing and at least three reasons why you like this activity so much.
12/14/10 – 12/18/10	Dear Santa Friendly Letter
1/11/10 – 1/14/10	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
1/25/10 – 1/29/10	Light is very important because…
2/8/10 – 2/12/10	Sometimes we give help, and sometimes we get help. Think about a time when you helped someone or when someone helped you. Tell a story about what happened.
2/22/10 – 2/26/10	Write a poem about your favorite food. Use all your 5 senses to describe your favorite food.
3/8/10 – 3/12/10	A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away lived a…
3/22/10 – 3/26/10	If you were given a free two-week dream vacation, where would you go and why?
4/12/10 – 4/16/10	Write about the butterfly life cycle.
4/26/10 – 4/30/10	Write a personal narrative about an event you enjoyed doing with family members or friends. Give details and tell what happened in time order.
5/10/10 – 5/14/10	Write about how plants grow.
5/24/10 – 5/28/10	Write about your favorite animal. Be sure to include descriptive details about your animal.
6/7/10 – 6/11/10	On a deserted island I’ll need…
6/21/10 – 6/25/10	Write a description about your favorite place. Use your five senses to help describe the place for the reader.
7/6/10 – 7/9/10	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
7/19/10 – 7/23/10	Write about what you’re looking forward to next year.

 

I could DO all that…. if I didn’t have an already full curriculum (which this of course isn’t alligned to).  Building the background knowledge for half of these would take most of my day. Many days.