Assertion Journal

Assertion Journal

After our Public Education debate I wanted to focus on a subject that was brought up, different grade levels. I remember someone arguing that students don’t move up based on their age, they move up based on the fact that they “mastered the content.” How can we tell if students have mastered the content? Yes, we have SOL tests and other things of that nature, but it’s been said that those are just to measure if students know the basic content of each subject. I personally don’t think a test that was made to pass shows the student has “mastered” anything. I think that after a student completes elementary school, they should be able to move up to whatever grade level, in whatever subject, they can mentally handle. We already do that with math. Some of the kids in our own class have jumped to higher levels of math. Why limit the ability to jump ahead a few grades to one subject? I would hope that we could make a test that isn’t multiple choice, that evaluates the knowledge a student has. If it’s not multiple choice students won’t have a high chance in guessing the right answer. Just like in high school, if the student doesn’t think they can handle a class, or a grade level, they can switch out to a different one. Instead of assuming the students master the content, lets actually test them and see.