FCAT Science

Florida Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion released the FCAT writ­ing scores a day ago, and school dis­tricts through­out Florida are search­ing for answers for why the writ­ing scores were sig­nif­i­cantly lower than last year. In fact so low that only about 1/3 of stu­dents who took the FCAT would have passed. Why the dra­matic change in scores? Sev­eral pos­si­ble rea­sons follow:

• A new set of stan­dards for how Florida Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion mea­sures stu­dents’ progress was made in the mid­dle of the school year.
•  Two indi­vid­u­als grade the FCAT now ver­sus one.
• School dis­tricts stated that teach­ers did not have enough time to pre­pare the stu­dents for the new writ­ing FCAT standards.

The Florida Board of Edu­ca­tion held an emer­gency meet­ing on May 15th, and voted to lower the pass­ing score from 4.0 to 3.0.  This will bring the pass­ing scores for this year close to the 80 per­cent or more from last years scores.

I have a dif­fi­cult time with stan­dards being low­ered whether it’s for test­ing pur­poses or indi­vid­ual courses. I believe we have to ask our­selves how writ­ing is being taught to the stu­dents. When school dis­tricts com­plain that there was not suf­fi­cient time for teach­ers to pro­vide instruc­tion for the writ­ing com­po­nent of FCAT we are back to teach­ing for the test.

Dur­ing my teacher train­ing work­shops I pro­mote the use of reflec­tive jour­nal­ing in all sci­ence classes K-12. One of the first ques­tions I ask teach­ers dur­ing my train­ing is how many of them imple­ment some type of sci­ence note­book in their class. Very few of the teach­ers raise their hands. In other-words, stu­dents are not being given the oppor­tu­nity to write in sci­ence. Teach­ers really enjoy and learn a great deal from the jour­nal­ing aspect of the teacher train­ings I con­duct, and many par­tic­i­pants state that they will begin imple­ment­ing jour­nal­ing in the sci­ence class­room after the training.

Daily jour­nal­ing in the sci­ence class­room allows the stu­dent to reflect upon what they have learned. The reflec­tive jour­nal is not your tra­di­tional stu­dent note­book with “ditto sheets” and lab sheets attached. Instead it con­sists pri­mar­ily of the indi­vid­ual stu­dents ideas, thoughts etc.. My sug­ges­tion to all the Florida school super­in­ten­dents and prin­ci­pals is to encour­age teach­ers to imple­ment reflec­tive jour­nal­ing in all sci­ence classes through­out the entire year. Reflec­tive jour­nal­ing allows stu­dents to develop and strengthen their inquiry skills, crit­i­cal think­ing skills, and  writ­ing skills.

For more detailed infor­ma­tion about the low FCAT writ­ing scores see the fol­low­ing arti­cle in Orlando Sentinel

The pho­tos below are from a recent Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, Engi­neer­ing, and Math (STEM) teacher train­ing work­shop I conducted.