Also, a lot of kids math problems (middle school and below) are super vague. I get that they're designed to teach a concept, but they could do it in a more exact/precise (idk what the word is) way.
That's straight how my teachers would explain it to us, and you see that line of thinking in the "problem solving" bits where the text is intentionally made harder to decrypt.
Reading skills and shared background assessments are baked into most math tests, even if that's not the focus of it.
Where I really hate to see it is humanities e.g. psychology tests/surveys - if after reading a question I immediately think of 3 different interpretations I just think it's a bad test. And if I spend any more time thinking about it I get almost nowhere.
Yes, I see it as "background" part, or "common sense" perhaps.
I's funny when for instance you have grocery questions about little Jimmy having 3 bags with 4 buns in each, so how many sausages does he need to make hotdogs with all the buns ?
That's cute and straightforward as long as you know what a hotdog is, which is common sense for the question writer.
I don't think that's something that needs to be (or can be) changed, as long as school and exams are seen as a formative step, and not a single chance you'll have to make a decent living. Kids in the later group will have a hard time either way.
Even if you don’t know what a hotdog is, it’s indicated you use sausages and buns to make them. The most straightforward method of doing that would lead to the correct answer.
There may be kids that figure that’s too simple and assume they need two or three sausages per bun, but those will be the minority.
Thankfully I think most questions usually aren't like this. Cultural loading in questions is a popular excuse for discrepancies in testing outcomes but those discrepancies have a nasty tendency to persist even when tests are redesigned. Usually there's something else going on which causes the outcome discrepancies, particularly bad parenting.
Like the Cold War era stories where spies use seemingly innocuous or nonsensical code phrases to identify each other. "The sparrow flies at midnight. Calculate the velocity it would need to reach Berlin in 7 days."
I taught myself the essence of calculus when I was 14 or 15 - there were holes in my knowledge but it took I'd estimate 5 years for regular education to catch up to the intuition I built then (on a houseboat on the Thames even, sounds romantic except for the fumes)
Conversely, I struggled immensely for a year and a half, once my 3 year lead on material ran out.
The difference in quality and speed in something you're self-motivated to do and are doing at your own pace, versus something you're being told to do at someone else's pace, even with the same person in both cases, is quite astounding.
Or maybe that's the viewpoint of someone with ADD, and most people can keep steady progress _and_ lead balanced lives. I'll never really know.
The interesting aspect to me was how they need to take a step back and look at it as a set of made up conventions, when they might have just absorbed it as universal truth otherwise.
I think where "traditional" education truly sucks tho (unless you are blessed with a gifted teacher), is giving you an overwiew of how the pieces fit together and what is behind each of them.
Personally, I'm a big fan of what Gates was attempting to do, but I have teachers in my family who couldn't get rid of Common Core from their schools fast enough. Debates with them were never good and me, not being an operator, wouldn't dare tell them how to do their jobs.
But, I understand difficult, standardized testing isn't a good answer, but really how do you get a whole nation to up-skill?
As far as I understand, most public schools are decentralized, at least the State level, if not further. Are you claiming that is not the case currently?
Sadly, we already know what works, individualized/custom attention that exposes the kid to a lot of fields. A worse way to put it, more money == better education. And this is largely true even if specifically wrong.
But once you try to scale that up, everything falls apart.
That is a bold expectation. Some schools will have an incentive to just have as much pupils pass the exam by lowering the bar, other will be incentivized to just teach the bare minimum, others won't have enough money if the model of excellence is expensive (and it probably will be).
And the model that applies to, say, a child who grew up with college-educated parents won't necessarily apply to the child from a blue collar family.
That is just to say that this is a hard problem. My intuition is that the only way to achieve the best education (excluding the case of hypergifted people) seems to be by throwing money at it through personalized education and tutoring and solving the child's other life problems, i.e. the wealthy kid model, but obviously that's not realistic when it comes to mass education. But maybe mass education (at the level we seem to expect from it) isn't realistic.
Or maybe we should reduce the number of subjects taught in school to math, language and physical education.
We really should be prioritizing the brightest students, because their brilliance has the best payoff for all of society. Better to have 100 students who are genuine math wizards and are prepared to continue building on what they know than to have 10000 students who sort of learn basic calculus then forget all of it, with those previous 100 lost in the noise and never given the resources to reach their potential.
Focusing on a standardized course plan that the student is able to learn, memorize and ultimately repeat effortlessly makes it easy to ensure that absolutely everything was reinforced properly.
There are several states in which that would be absolutely disastrous.
Also: Many highly advanced nations have a national-level curriculum. What is different and why does it work?
How could anyone know that, if each school has its own curriculum and exams? If you got 4 gold stars out of 5 on your reading comprehension and I got three palm leaves out of 4 at literature interpretation, which one of us is getting a better education?
Except in, say, China, where none of that applies and education works great.
You can just say unions, no need to beat around the bush. Anyway, I don't really agree. Of course some teachers are stuck in the mud, but other teachers are eager to try new things and improve outcomes. If unfettered by standardization they would be eagerly experimenting with new approaches to teaching their subjects. And if school funding weren't reliant on teachers "teaching the test", then schools would find ways to reward these teachers because it makes the administration look good to have passionate and proactive teachers.
Yup the school system plagued by epidemic cheating where cheating is even accepted to some level (you are an idiot if you don't cheat).
"Do you want the burger or the ribs?"
Pity the poor child who is capable of thinking both inductively and reductively. Such lax testing standards reminds me of the story of the WWII cryptographer in Cryptonomicon who is asked to work out how long a ship would take to travel down the river, comes up with a new theory of fluid dynamics, and flunks the test.
I don’t know if the vagueness is intentional. It can open interesting perspectives but it can also be a burden for children, who has difficulties understanding the context.
Eh. I knew about it before I took the SAT. It was in various brain teasers books.