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Entries from CompareAndContrastPosts


MathInSalinaKansas 23 Jun 2006 - 13:28 CarolynJohnston


From a forum I sometimes visit, I followed a link today to an urban legends website with a page on an internet claim about an 8th grade final exam supposedly given in Salina, Kansas, in 1895. Here are a few of the test questions in the arithmetic section:

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20.00 per in?

8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

When I looked at the Urban Legends page about this 1895 test I found that, contrary to my expectation, they weren't debunking the claim that it was a genuine final test from 1895. They were taking issue with the claim that it showed that educational standards had fallen since 1895:

What nearly all these pundits fail to grasp is "I can't answer these questions" is not the same thing as "These questions demonstrate that students in earlier days were better educated than today's students." Just about any test looks difficult to those who haven't recently been steeped in the material it covers. If a 40-year-old can't score as well on a geography test as a high school student who just spent several weeks memorizing the names of all the rivers in South America in preparation for an exam, that doesn't mean the 40-year-old's education was woefully deficient -- it means he simply didn't retain information for which he had no use, no matter how thoroughly it was drilled into his brain through rote memory some twenty-odd years earlier.

Lame, lame, lame. If you can't prove that this is not an authentic graduate exam from 1895, then complaining about it just makes you sound like a whiner (and notice the dig about 'rote memory' -- memorization is in very bad odor these days).

Besides, it's not about us (and what we retained) anymore: it's about our kids. And I am afraid it does imply that we've dumbed down the junior high curriculum. Only a tiny minority of kids graduating 8th grade these days could handle sophisticated word problems like these, even if we gave them the bushel-conversion formulas for free. Apart from the emphasis on farming applications, which is kind of funny and endearing, the application area of problems 6 and 8 (just for an example) is as alive, or more so, in 2005 as it was in 1895, and we simply do not teach it. In the late 1980s, I taught an elective course at LSU on the material covered in these problems. The entering students were completely ignorant of that material, mastery of which I claim is necessary to living adult life competently (and they were very glad to finally learn it, too). Many students who were stronger mathematically, and didn't take that elective math course, are no doubt still ignorant of it, because it is not taught in public schools anymore.

The second thing that leaps out at me is that these are mostly application problems -- word problems -- not problems testing either basic computation or deep understanding of the beauty of mathematics (with the exception of problem 1). It was just assumed that these kids could do the computations necessary to solve these problems, without calculators. What they needed to do was to solve those problems, and get the right answer, and that hasn't changed a bit. And I'll bet there was no partial credit given for having the right idea, either.


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MathInSalinaKansasPart2 23 Jun 2006 - 13:28 CatherineJohnson


re: MathInSalinaKansas

Wow.

I spoke yesterday to a mathematics professor at a university here in New York state.

When I asked him what level of mathematical knowledge entering freshmen bring to their course work, he said, "We can't assume that a student knows anything we would want him to know."

Specifically, his students can't do algebra.

They can't set up a two-variable word problem and solve it.

These are college freshmen.

Posted on May 07, 2005 @ 11:21


MathInSalinaKansasPart3 23 Jun 2006 - 13:28 CatherineJohnson


re: MathInSalinaKansas

Three sample problems from the PRAXIS 1 Content Assessment college students entering the field of education are frequently required to take:

1. Which of the following is equal to a quarter of a million?
a) 40,000 b) 250,000 c) 2,500,000 d) 1/4,000,000 e) 4/1,000,000


2. Which of the following fractions is least?
a) 11/10 b) 99/100 c) 25/24 d) 3/2 e) 501/500


3. Which of the sales commissions shown below is greatest?
a