Ian Fernandez and his mom, Karen, sit at their kitchen table going over his math assignment for the night.
Fernandez is a fifth grader at Child’s Elementary School in Bloomington, and his math worksheet is something most of us would recognize; lists of number expressions looking for solutions, or diagrams of shapes with labeled edges that help students find the area and perimeter.
Ian is comfortable doing these problems but then I show him and Karen some practice questions for this year’s fifth grade math ISTEP.
There’s a plot of land, divided diagonally across the middle, and part A asks how much fencing is needed to separate and surround the two sides. Ian knows what this part of the question is asking.
But Part B asks for the area of one half of the land, which means finding the area of a triangle, something he hasn’t learned yet. So we move on to Part C, which asks him to draw another way the plot could be divided that uses less fencing.
And finally a calculation of how much less fencing is used in the second version.
Karen had to help Ian through a few parts of this question, since it looked so different from his regular homework, where geometry questions are not so word heavy.
The point of the new version of the ISTEP is not to confuse or frustrate kids, but to push them into relating the content to real life problems and know how they arrived at their answer.
"It’s really making sure students are being mindful of the process of solving the problem and being able to articulate that process. That’s really a skill they will need as they move forward in becoming more college and career ready," says Michelle Walker, the Indiana Department of Education's Director of Assessment. "Because if a child can articulate how they actually solved the problem, then they’ve internalized that process."
When Indiana passed its own academic standards this spring, Walker and her team were charged with creating a test to match the new standards. Another change Walker says students and teachers will notice is a more focused writing prompt. Rather than asking students to write about something inconsequential like whether the cafeteria should add cake to the menu, they will be asked to read a passage and write a paragraph or essay on a related prompt, using the passage for evidence.
Since the adjustment to the new test is happening so fast, Walker says it’s important for parents to help push their students to think in the way the assessment will test them.
"I think the most important thing is have a child talk through what they’re thinking as they walk through a math problem or as they read a story and respond in writing or ask kids questions about what they’ve read," she says.
Back in the Fernandez kitchen, Karen feels that pressure to help prepare her child for the ISTEP.
"But I don’t think you can expect that of everyone and it just widens that gap. It’s a lot of homework for the whole family," Karen says.
But she says the growing pains of preparing for this year’s test are worth the bigger goal.
"Let’s look at the biggest possible picture we can. Who are our kids going to be competing against? So I applaud the goals, I just don’t have any expertise to comment on the methods."
Practice questions, writing prompts and standards guides are now available on the DOE’s website.
