Reply to Multiplication in MAP for first grade

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In about third grade, mine came home asking about something that turned out to be square roots (lots of weird scratchings and awkward explanations went into figuring THAT out!).

They’ll always hit something totally unfamiliar before their test ends. That’s the entire point of it: it keeps getting progressively harder, until it hits a level where your kid misses more than 50% of the questions. [/quote]

Yes! My kid is great at math but I guess we never taught her to tell time because on her first MAP she ended up getting a million questions about clocks…she was annoyed at us. [/quote]

Yep. MAP is not a Math proficiency test. It’s purely a test of what a student has been exposed to. If your first grader answered every 1st grade level correctly but nothing else, they wouldn’t come close to the top percentiles. For that, you need to teach how to tell time on a clock, how to count money and coins, how to multiply and divide, etc. [/quote]
The kid has to actually solve problems. That sounds like proficiency.[/quote]

Sure - maybe I should have been more clear and said that it's not simply a "grade level" proficiency test. But my point stands - your first grader is not going to score at the top of the test unless you teach them what a quadrilateral is, how to identify an isosceles triangle, what the difference between obtuse and acute angles are, etc. At first grade, they are merely expected to be able to add and subtract per the MCPS curriculum. One could be quite proficient at that, but would yield a pretty pedestrian score. [/quote]

I'm a NP and I don't know... You may very well be right and I've never taken the MAP myself, but I had inferred that above grade level, the test is easier if you have been directly instructed/exposed to certain concepts... but that if a child is bright, many of the problems can sort of be deciphered or good educated guesses made without having had previous exposure. [/quote]

I’m the PP whose kid was stumped by the square root questions. If you don’t even know what the symbol means, it’s pretty hard to make an educated guess. Same for stuff like sine and cosine later on.

Mine often ended up getting far enough that she saw stuff she’d never encountered before, but still scored in the low-90th percentiles because she was able to make those educated guesses about harder or more complex versions of concepts she already knew (think three-digit addition when the current curriculum only covers single-digit). But she’d never shown much interest in math enrichment outside of school (more of a reader), so we didn’t do anything to introduce those extremely advanced concepts that might have gotten her to the high-90s. [/quote]

What you're saying makes sense to me (I'm the PP to whom you're responding). This is not a humblebrag, but my kid has been in the 99.9th since 1st grade and we do zero enrichment (at least zero intentional enrichment) and she's not getting it from TV or some other place, because she doesn't have that kind of exposure. I totally buy the argument that DH and I exposed her to some concepts incidentally, like maybe an analog clock, making change (?), fractions/percentages (we like to cook and shop), etc. I doubt we ever showed her a square root sign or mentioned isosceles triangles or most other "advanced" ideas, though. Maybe my kid is really good at guessing, IDK. I had assumed most of what got her there was deciphering since she didn't have that much outside exposure. [/quote]

Sorry, "she doesn't have that kind of exposure" sounds weird! I just meant we don't have TV, she doesn't have a tablet, etc., she doesn't consume any media we don't know about unless it's at school.... not in a controlling way, she just doesn't have the opportunity. She doesn't have older siblings, other caregivers, babysitters, etc. who could have mentioned the concepts. She could have gotten it from graphic novels, lol, but otherwise I am not sure where she would have gotten it.  [/quote]

During virtual schooling last Fall at the height of the pandemic, I watched our elementary school DD take the MAP-M test. While there are some higher level questions that kids can make educated guesses about, most of the questions that go beyond their grade level in my experience required some type of exposure - they weren't more difficult versions of grade-level math or conceptual questions that a good Math brain could reason out, but instead tested whether one knew a concept or not. Pretty basic stuff, just a wide breadth of topics covered that go well beyond the grade level curriculum. Not sure how a kid would be able to identify what an obtuse or right angle is without ever hearing that phrase. Same for symbols like finding the square root of something, or calculating what 3 to the 3rd power is. Adding fractions and finding the common denominator, knowing what a trapezoid is, etc. As others have pointed out, the same goes for stuff that a lot of Kindergarten students face on the test, like telling time on a clock or identifying the value of various coins. There are actually websites you can find where you can put in your child's current grade and MAP-M score and it will show you the kind of questions they likely received at the end of the test and will identify concepts that they will likely face at that level and beyond. We used that to prep our DD the next time around so she was exposed to the concepts that would keep her in the 99th percentile (our school's principal hates compacted math and does whatever he can to limit the amount of kids in the class so we're not taking any chances).  [/quote]

PP, I'm that old PP you were responding to, just seeing this. A quick Google didn't turn up a site where I could plug in my kid's grade and score, but I saw some sample question... IDK.

Everything you said makes perfect sense. It really does.

But then I just don't know what to say about why my kid has always scored so high. I mean, I do think some things could be guessed at-- not necessarily literally "find the common denominator" if you've never heard that phrase, but maybe figuring out that 1/4 + 1/2 = 3/4. I'm sure my kid could figure that out in Kindergarten because she got an allowance and helped cook. Or maybe there were some concepts which she would say she'd never heard of, but when pressed on a test might be able to recall just enough to make an educated guess. For example, not an obtuse angle, but a right angle. I don't think I ever taught her about them, but that does come up in conversations with DH or whatever once in a blue moon.

I'm a very good test taker myself. I don't know what specific skills that entails, but tests are at least in part gameable or decipherable no matter what the subject. Sometimes you can get a sense of what's being asked, or at least what answers are probably incorrect, by the phrasing. I remember one of the questions on Millionaire many years ago was like... "The disease caused by the tsetse fly is most commonly referred to as what?" Or something. And of course the answer is "sleeping sickness," but even if you didn't know that, the other choices were scientific names, so you might guess that "commonly referred to as" = something more like "sleeping sickness."

I don't know.

I just feel like your explanation makes perfect sense AND it implies that my kid must have been exposed to many concepts significantly beyond her grade level... many and significantly being key words there... and yet I don't see how that's been the case. I just don't know. [/quote]

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