My 5th grade students took their county test for science and did so poorly. Since we're departmentalized and I'm the science teacher I keep beating myself up over it. I didn't even finish teaching all the standards yet and 1/3 Of the questions were from 4th grade. But I looped with them and was their science teacher in 4th grade too so information is not being retained. I just feel like I failed them. They do so well on unit tests.... ugh.
Does it provide any breakdowns of where they were stronger/weaker, like many state tests do for math / ELA? Also, what kind of growth from previous years was there? In a spectrum - to what extent do you feel that the content was being learned as individual facts as opposed to developing an understanding of the world around them? In other words, with a math analogy (I know, it was science -- giving an example using math is easier though ), was it more learning a bunch of algorithms, or was there a focus around the meaning behind the algorithms and how each of the math concepts were interconnected? Learn & grow - that's all we can do! That's what we ask our students to do each day, so we have to make sure we do the same.
