Is this good news or bad news for Indiana? You be the judge:
More than half of Indiana's seventh-graders passed the state's mandatory science exam, administered to that age group en masse for the first time last fall. Fifty-two percent of the state's 80,863 seventh-grade students passed the science assessment, a new section in the annual Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus exam. That left 47 percent below the benchmark, said Mary Tiede Wilhelmus, spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Education; 1 percent of the results were unscoreable."We certainly know we need to do better, but this is a starting point," said Tiede Wilhelmus. Two areas that gave kids trouble, she said, were sections on the nature of science and technology -- which included scientific investigation -- and one focusing on the physical universe.
Indianapolis schools fared much worse, with only 18% passing the exam. A sample exam is here. It's pretty open-ended. I had to guess on the first one - I remembered the orbits as being circular rather than elliptical, and that is one of the correct answers.
Posted by kswygert at March 30, 2006 05:01 PM