Blog Post #14: Content Standards

Supplemental Material Needed:

                The selected textbooks I reviewed for grades 6-8 are fairly standard textbooks. The information within the textbooks were generally more concrete, knowledge based questions with a so-called “application” section within each chapter. What these textbooks and those similar to them really need are more high order, open-ended types of questions that apply to students real lives. Many of the application sections discussed ideas that were not relevant to the lives of middle school students and typically included a short paragraph describing how a professional uses math in his or her everyday life. Additionally, the majority of the standards that addressed making connections between concepts were not covered in these textbooks. The textbooks included the concepts separately but did not attempt to build connections for students.

                The textbooks for the other grade levels assessed by my classmates, were similar to those I assessed for the middle grades. In general, the textbooks only included the skills of the content addressed in the standards but lacked application and review. In many circumstances, the standards were not addressed at all in the textbooks. This is further evidence that the textbooks that are currently in schools are outdated and do not correspond to the new Common Core standards.

 

Concept Development:

                There was very little differentiation within the textbooks themselves that showed the differences within the grade levels. All three textbooks had similar topics covered throughout the entire book. It can be assumed that each of the concepts covered gradually increase in difficulty as students’ progress from grade level to grade level. The standards, however, do not include a great deal of overlap as do the textbooks. Students will need to understand the 6^th grade content listed in the standards before moving onto the 7^th and 8^th grade standards of course, but there is not a whole lot of repetition of common geometry topics from one grade level to the next. The 6^th grade standards focus on area, surface area, and volume; the 7^th grade standards focus on three dimensional objects; and the 8^th grade standards focus on rotations, reflections, and translations. These concepts build upon one another rather than repeat one another.