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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Do high performing charters reinvent the wheel as well? What Singapore and other countries? We are also in ward 3 DCPS elementary. Our emerging concern is the inconsistency in materials. Some good. Some repetitive crap. Some even handwritten. There also seems to be too much practice on tactics for filling in the bubbles on a test and not enough on actually understanding word problems. One child told me he was told to just pick whichever answer is closest to his rather than checking his answer first. The latest thing is websites, 2 different ones, that seem too focused on multiple choice. It's not clear to me that the teachers have gone thrush all the questions themselves. It seems like there are one or two poorly constructed word problems a month. Our other child has better verbal comprehension than numeracy. He is less comfortable guessing than his sibling. At first he thought there were trick questions on purpose.

Supposedly the school is teaching more depth and less breadth. Is it possible to do that and test taking tactics to 6-8 year Olds?[/quote]

Nothing wrong with students learning test-taking tactics, but part of that goes with critical thinking and common sense.

Like, don't procrastinate, wait until the last minute and then doing panicked cramming of everything the night before the exam.

Like, having the common sense to skip on to the next question and potentially come back to it later if you are stuck, rather than burning all your time on that one problem, running out of time and missing potentially easier questions later on in the exam.

Like, knowing if the answer to a math problem is at least in the correct order of magnitude, or has the correct units

Like, knowing enough of the content to be able to eliminate one or two of the possible multiple-choice answers right off the bat and increasing your odds of getting the right answer even if you have to guess

Like, knowing that there ARE what they call "logical distractors" - a/k/a "trick questions" to check and see if kids are applying critical thinking skills

But sadly, even for what other posters talk about with regard to "teaching to the test" or "teaching test-taking" they don't seem to even get fundamental things like that right.

It all begs the question, what in the hell ARE they teaching, given it evidently isn't content, and obviously isn't "test-taking".[/quote]

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