Day 156 Honors Placement Test

6th Grade Math Standards: Many of them

The Objective: N/A

Agenda:

1. Give students the open response portion of the honors placement test
2. Have students work on the weekly quiz for the rest of the block
3. Have students work on the open response portion of the honors placement test in the next part of class
4. Have students continue to work on the weekly quiz
5. Give students the opportunity to finish the mean absolute deviation surveys from the previous class

Homework: The weekly quiz will be collected as a homework assignment in the next class

The Assessment: The honors placement test open response is graded by me and the multiple choice part is graded by Scantron. We do this test as a sixth grade math team every year to give us a common assessment to determine eligibility for honors.

The weekly quiz will also be assessed for most students in the next class (although the students that passed it in early today did it get checked).

Glass Half-Full Take: My main concern going into today was that students who had no chance to get into honors would be done in two minutes and then distract students that were not done quickly. Fortunately the students were great and some were still asleep because it is Monday.

One Regret: It's easy to say why give this test to every student even though some students would not qualify. To me though, it's very hard to draw the line and even harder to suggest to all the other students "you are not worthy of taking this test." I have no regrets about administering to every student, but I do have regrets about the pressure-packed nature of this test. A couple students told me that they did not want to be in honors. I understand their sense of worry. I wish that we were not in a culture right now of high-stakes tests and making students fearful of math.

I also thought that we could have altered two questions because they did not really reflect sixth grade questions.

Finally, a third regret I had with the honors placement test was that it came only one class (and one weekend) after the students finished MCAS. Again though, this is just something we cannot control. We need some type of common assessment that takes place at the end of the year to most accurately reflect where students are. All of this would be cured of course if the MCAS results were given much quicker than they are. Then we could simply take the MCAS results and use that as an end of year benchmark.