Letter: SAGE math test is defective on many levels
(Editor's note, there were over 20 responses to this letter in the Salt Lake Tribune)
During the past month I have carefully examined my ninth grade granddaughter’s “SAGE review” assignments in mathematics. My review concludes that these SAGE reviews and the SAGE testing adopted by Utah are in fact destructive. I will urge my daughter to have my granddaughter opt out of the test. Some of the reasons are:
1) The reviews are themselves mathematically flawed (as in full of errors, containing deliberately constructed purposeless traps in multiple choice questions) and often tested with a total lack of conceptual explanation that makes them unacceptable for student use. In my judgment they do not meet professional mathematical standards. I have made a file with scores of examples.
2) The material covered by the reviews and the test is not adequately taught in classes and does not have written resources for students. Teachers are largely not trained in much of the material.
3) Most students do not have resources to help understand the material, and in many cases they become unfairly and profoundly discouraged about mathematics and themselves, which is a genuinely horrible outcome.
4) Parents are in general far more likely to be unable to assist their children, frustrating both generations and breaking a common and historic link of help and growth.
Having spent my entire professional life (more than 30 years) as a teaching and research professor of mathematics at Utah State University, I yield to no one in my desire to improve mathematical training in this nation, but personally know of no system of mathematical testing that I consider as defective, negative and unsatisfactory as Utah’s current SAGE process.
Chris S. Coray
Garden City
No comments:
Post a Comment