If you live in a state that uses the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)’s assessment for the Common Core State Standards in math, then you want to make sure you avoid letting anyone make the score interpretation mistake I describe in this post. Take a look at the data that comes from a school’s 2016 scores in mathematics.
When teachers begin to implement problem-based learning, several questions consistently come up and I have a slide to discuss them during my presentations. At the 2014 California Math Council (CMC) North conference in Asilomar, Michael Fenton mentioned that these questions would be worth sharing in a blog post. Anyone else think @robertkaplinsky should write a…
Today we found this problem on the Smarter Balanced Practice Test (Grade 8 – Question 15): It provided the basis for a worthwhile conversation on the importance of students having conceptual understanding. The problem is based on these 8th grade standards: There are two main ways to approach this problem: conceptually or procedurally. If you…
I’ll be honest with you: I remember first learning about Bloom’s Taxonomy when I was getting my teaching credential but I never really thought it was that big of a deal. I had a decent understanding of what it was and how you could implement it. What I didn’t get was why it mattered. As…
Articulating why the Common Core State Standards are such a big change for mathematics can be challenging, especially if your audience is unfamiliar with them, like parents and other non-educators. After all, isn’t it just changing the standards? Fellow educators also feel the stress, but may have trouble stating exactly why that is. How do…
Several years ago I had a profound moment that led me to completely rethink what it meant to understand mathematics. I was still in the classroom and had been working with 6th graders on adding and subtracting mixed numbers. My formative assessments and observations showed that most students were proficient, and I felt pleased. To…
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) released its practice test on May 29, 2013 and it will be available to the entire public (including parents and students) until the official test is released during the 2014-2015 school year. The test will ultimately be administered to grades 3-8 and 11 and there are separate practice tests…