California Content Standards - Practice and Mastery

Before Spring Break I passed out three California standards-based test preparation booklets. They are titled California Content Standards: Practice and Mastery. They cover three different content areas: 1) English-Language Arts, 2) Mathematics, and 3) Science.

I hope you have seen these new materials already. I did ask the students to bring them home over Spring Break so that you could see them. These are new this year, and replace CAMS (Comprehensive Assessment of Mathematics Strategies) and CARS (Comprehensive Assessment of Reading Strategies) you may remember from previous years. CAMS and CARS were useful tools, but were too generic. The new Practice and Mastery booklets specifically target the California Content Standards, what I am teaching and your children are learning. They should be better preparation for this year's STAR test than CAMS and CARS.

I will have the students taking these practice tests in the classroom. I will not be assigning any of them as homework. Each practice test is considerably longer than the tests from CAMS and CARS, and just are not appropriate for homework. There are four practice tests each for Mathematics and Science, and two for English-Language Arts.

Don't hesitate to ask your child to see their corrected answer documents. I intend to grade each of these practice tests, so that I can see precisely how well they are doing, and note areas of strength and weakness that will guide the review of concepts and skills that we will be doing over the next two weeks, leading up to this year's STAR test.