When Knox students take the ISTEP test for the last time, school administrators want to make sure they’re prepared for the Math portion.
High School Principal Dr. Elizabeth Ratliff told the school board Monday that teachers are getting extra training this week. “They will be working on the problem portion of the test, working on consistent grading, those things that go with our ISTEP test,” she explained. “Remember, we have the ISTEP for one more year, and then we go back to the ECAs. So what we want to do is be sure we set the kids up this year for the best that they can be.”
She said teachers are working to incorporate the kind of multi-step Math problems seen on the ISTEP into the regular curriculum. “That’s where they struggled. It’s the Math processing standards. And that goes down to not only the freshman, the eighth grade, the seventh grade. It throws all kinds of stuff in it, where our Algebra test tested Algebra. So those multi-step problems, what we want to be sure is that our teachers know how to grade them, that they’re grading them consistently, and that they’re incorporated into our everyday classrooms, under the format that they’re going to see on the assessment.”
Ratliff said a lot of high schools around the state have struggled with the Math portion of the ISTEP.
