The Deseret News – Rachel Monahan
“With two weeks to go before New Mexico was set to administer its new standardized tests, Angel Mendez’s seventh-grade math classes at Truman Middle School here were taking an official practice exam online. The new tests from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (or PARCC, for short) are the first to be associated with the new higher standards of the Common Core and, unlike the past state exams, are being given on computer and with a time limit. Despite concerns the technology would trip them up, the students appeared to navigate the computer-based test with ease — marking questions they wanted to come back to later, for example. It was the math that seemed to give them trouble. Their enthusiastic first-year teacher had used the Common Core standards to guide what he’d taught the students all year, but the content of the sample exam, which required dragging and dropping algebraic expressions into boxes and filling in blank boxes with equations, was proving challenging.”(more)