Today in the classroom, they were doing a lot of test prepping. They are getting ready to take the Florida Standard Assessment (FSA) next week. The teacher went over the math practice test they took in January. She showed the children why they may have gotten a question wrong. One of the main reasons is that they were not coding the text to see exactly what the question wanted to know. One of her ELL students is new and was not here to take the practice test. The teacher wanted to give her a chance to answer the questions, so I sat in the middle of the pod with the student. I found out that as an ELL student the teacher is allowed to read the directions and the question out loud but not the answers to the question. While watching the student take her practice test, I could see that she was still in the pre-operational stage according to Piaget. At her age, she should be more in the concrete-operational stage. She had a hard time with numbers in general. The student would draw a model or write out the equation but if her answer did not match one of the answers given she would just guess at the answer. Then she would change her model or equation to match the answer, even if it was the wrong answer. I really noticed her stage when she was trying to round numbers. I am not sure if she did not understand the logic behind rounding numbers or if because she is an ELL student, she did not understand the question. She would write out the correct answer and not the answer the question was looking for.
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