Sunday, February 15, 2015

Ohio high school students taking 6th-grade PARCC standardized math test

Hear that train a comin', comin' round the bend … -- "Folsom Prison Blues"

If you want to see why the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) standardized tests are likely to be a train wreck, just watch these Ohio high school students taking a 6th grade-level online practice test.

Or link here:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=327363847461483

Here's what the kids said about the video -- and their experience with a standardized test that will be given to 6th-graders in Ohio later this spring:

Brooke on the right and Megan (myself) in the middle are both seniors, Melanie is in the middle and is in 10th grade. We are taking the practice Math PBA PARCC test for sixth grade.
Brooke is in Calculus which is only available on the track of honors math classes meaning during freshman year she started in Geometry, although students can get on the track and double up on math classes for a year and get up to calculus.
I took a quarter of calculus but dropped it because I did not need it for college and am taking statistics.
Melanie is in honors classes but is a sophomore, she had more of a fresher memory to middle school math since she's younger. This test was hard for ALL three of us. We recorded our reactions to taking a few sample questions of this test.

Posted to Facebook Feb. 14 by the Ohio chapter of Badass Teachers (Ohio BATs). In lieu of a mission statement on the About Us page: "BATs is full support of authentic teaching and public schools; giving teachers and parents back their voices in legislative decisions regarding students!" This video, 13:27 minutes long, will certainly help do that.

LATER: The national Badass Teachers Association has uploaded it to YouTube (see embedded video above), with this note: "What happens when an Honors Calculus student, an Honors Algebra 2 student, and a Honors Statistics student meet with the 6th grade online version of the practice PBA PARCC Math Test? (BTW, One of these gals has a goal to be a teacher!)"