Education版 - Arkansas State posts proposed guidelines for math |
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发帖数: 19398 | 1 A draft of newly revised math standards to be used as the basis for
instruction in the state's kindergarten-through-12th-grade classrooms is now
available online for public scrutiny and comment.
The proposed Arkansas Mathematical Standards, the work of some 170 educators
including teachers, content specialists and higher education faculty
members, will go to the state Board of Education for approval, probably in
March. The draft math standards are a change from the Common Core State
Standards that more than 40 states -- including Arkansas -- adopted in 2010.
A link to the draft standards and a survey about the draft standards is
available at the Arkansas Education Department's website: www.arkansas.gov.
Elementary school math skills related to telling time and counting money are
given a greater emphasis in the newly revised, proposed standards, Arkansas
Department of Education leaders Stacy Smith and Thomas Coy said earlier
this week.
Logic, regular and irregular polygons and Venn diagrams also have a place in
the proposed standards.
Statistics, however, are largely extracted from the proposed standards for
algebra II and are being reserved for a new high school course.
In all, 65 percent of the existing math standards have been revised or
clarified in the new draft standards. That percentage ranges from 45 percent
of the standards in first grade to 95 percent of the standards for math in
kindergarten. Sixty-two percent of the standards for high school math were
revised or clarified.
"You will see -- and this is where I think the teachers did a really good
job -- they rewrote the content standards in a way that will be helpful to
classroom teachers all across Arkansas," said Smith, the Education
Department's director of curriculum and instruction. "So it doesn't matter
if you are in a classroom in Nashville, Arkansas, or if you are in Northwest
Arkansas, we are hoping that two teachers will interpret the standards in
the exact same way."
Smith is adamant that the math committees for elementary, middle and high
school standards did more than "re-brand" the Common Core State Standards.
The Common Core standards were criticized by some teachers and parents in
Arkansas and nationally for reasons that included being inappropriate for
the students at certain grade levels.
The Common Core State Standards were the focus last year of a task force
created by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and led by Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin that
concluded that the Arkansas Education Department should undertake a review
and revision of the standards for both math and English/language arts.
"You are going to have some people who will look at this document and say
that these are the same skills, that there is not a change," Smith said
about the draft math standards. "My answer to that is before we ever had
Common Core and we had our Arkansas standards and when they did a [
comparison] of those Arkansas standards to the new Common Core standards,
you had 90 percent or so correlation. Math is still math and reading is
still reading. The content is still there."
Smith said that the revision committees of Arkansas math educators started
late last year with the Common Core standards and with results of teacher
and parent surveys about those standards. The committees went grade by grade
and standard by standard in their work, she said about the revision process.
"A lot of times the content is the same but they reworded it, broke it up or
added teacher notes to it for clarification to support the teacher in the
classroom," she said.
Coy, public school program manager at the Education Department, said the
math committees took current standards that were "weighty and very long" and
broke out individual skills. It "unpacks the standards" as a way to save
time and confusion, he said.
He said the committees didn't want to specify how teachers should teach the
standards.
"But one of the things we really tried to capture, so that the standards are
implemented more consistently across all our schools, is some guidance for
teachers," Coy said. "We didn't want to step into dictating curriculum but
we wanted them to understand what is the true intent of the standard.".
"Some of the criticism about the Common Core has been over the assignments
that go home," he added. "We are hoping that with some of these notes and
clarifications, the teachers ... will pick really good lessons or good
homework on which parents will actually be able to assist their children."
As an example of the changes in the standards at the kindergarten level, the
current standards call for children to count to 100 by ones and 10s. The
revised standards would require children to count by ones, fives and 10s.
An addition to the third-grade standards calls for students to understand
that the four digits of a four-digit number represent amounts of thousands,
hundreds, tens and ones.
The proposed standards retain the same system for labeling or numbering that
is used in the Common Core math standards, Smith said. The same
nomenclature will enable Arkansas teachers to continue to draw on the state
and national resources, including lessons and projects, that have been
developed to help with teaching math. One of the advantages cited earlier
about the Common Core set of standards was the wide availability of teaching
resources beyond a state's borders.
The Education Department is asking teachers and the general public to review
the proposed standards and answer a survey about them. There were more than
2,100 survey responses to the survey by midweek, Smith said. The survey
will be open into early February.
Education Department staff members are monitoring the results to find
proposed standards that are not receiving a 90 percent approval rating from
the survey responders. Those standards will be subject to further study and
possibly thrown back to the committees of educators, Smith said.
The draft standards, once finalized and approved by the state Board of
Education, would begin being used in the 2016-17 school year but fully
implemented in the following 2017-18 school year.
Ouida Newton of Leola, Arkansas' 2015 Teacher of the Year, has been a math
teacher for more than three decades. She was an advocate for the Common Core
State Standards and their focus on rigor and higher-order thinking skills.
But she has served on the middle and high school math standards committees
and said that the committee work has made the standards clearer.
"There were some standards that when we looked at them, we weren't sure what
exactly they wanted," Newton said Friday. "We clarified the standards and
we put in some examples of what a standard was trying to get the student to
do. And we put in some notes for the teachers as far as teaching strategies
or ways they might put two standards together and teach them at the same
time."
Newton said the revised standards do not take away from the rigor of the
Common Core math standards.
"We have looked at the foundational skills that the students are going to
need and we've made sure that the critical thinking skills and problem-
solving skills are still there for the students," Newton said.
Metro on 01/23/2016
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