To Guest55 or mystery, what Year Gp is this question pitched

[Blitz]

I love that method.... I have never heard of bar modelling and will certainly google it.

I'm a visual learner too. I'm forever saying to my pupils, "If in doubt, draw it out."

[southbucks3]

Now I have set myself a massive homework...to find out about bar modelling and Singapore maths, which seem interlinked....not tonight though...too tired, too much telly to catch up on, and too much ironing...and I can't be bothered I will deffo look properly tomorrow as it looks very interesting.

[Guest55]

I prefer a blank number line - it is the same idea.

[mystery]

The maths in a word problem should be at a lower level than the level the child can calculate. The words are 'distractors', i.e. they distract the child from the maths.

Try googling 'bar modelling', it provides a diagrammatic way of solving these logical problems and renders them simple. I'm a very visual thinker and teach visually too, so a diagram suits my methods. I used to draw a diagram to teach this, but now I can use bars!

For the example with boys and girls a bar can be drawn.
Write 72 above the bar. Then ask what do we know. 6 more girls than boys. Put a line cutting the bar into a large and small part and write 6 in the small part. Those are the extra girls. Now split the rest of the bar evenly in 2. We know that the rest of the bar is 72 - 6 = 66. Half are boys, so boys are 33 and girls are 33 + 6 = 39.
Check 39 + 33 = 72

Why should the maths in a word problem be easier than a child can calculate?

The words should be in their vocabulary though. Where did the "thereafter" question come from?

If cem put words like that in maths questions they need to re-think. I should hope this question was not from any public maths exam for school children.

[kenyancowgirl]

mystery: "If cem put words like that in maths questions they need to re-think."

Why? CEM are trying to select the "most able" with their tests. If a child can understand the vocabulary and do the maths, then surely that indicates that they have a higher VR and mathematical ability than a child who doesn't understand the vocab and/or the maths. The point about a selective test, surely, is to select - if they made everything comfortable for the children taking it then you would have lots of children passing and not enough places, even in a county like Kent, which is far better served (over-served) for Grammar Schools!

The one thing about CEM that you should tell your dc is to expect the unexpected. In the three years it has run here, although they all have Cloze, NVR, Maths and other VR, they have been different and, not necessarily the type of thing they encounter every day in the National Curriculum. That is the point. It allows selection, it looks for "natural ability" if that is what you want to call it, and is harder to tutor/coach for.

[mystery]

Tests need to be carefully put together otherwise a child fails for the wrong reasons. The 10 year old who knows the word thereafter or is not thrown by its use in a maths question is not necessarily any cleverer than the child who does not know that word, or is thrown by not knowing it and does not complete the maths question.

Anyone can take a word problem and throw in some florid language to throw a ten year old off the scent - particularly one for whom English is a recent second language. Is that fair or likely to lead to the selection of the most intelligent pupils? No, not at all. Anyone can write down a load of questions to trip up children but these would not be good ability tests. Psychometric testing is not a perfect science but it's a whole lot better than that.

Where did the thereafter question come from? It's a bad one.

[southbucks3]

Anyone can take a word problem and throw in some florid language t

Love the word "florid"....makes me think of parish councillors, WI group leaders and dusty old lawyers.

Asked boys question today, 10yr old got it immediately, 9 year old without prompting asked if "they mean the next days" I ignored him and he got it right, but like I said last yea maybe not, year 3 deffo not!

Drew out a stack of books problem for ds3 this morning on a bar model..it worked a treat ...He did the next one on a line by himself, as guest55 suggested...I think this may be the way his school help, same principle really.

[Proud_Dad]

mystery: "If cem put words like that in maths questions they need to re-think."

Why? CEM are trying to select the "most able" with their tests. If a child can understand the vocabulary and do the maths, then surely that indicates that they have a higher VR and mathematical ability than a child who doesn't understand the vocab and/or the maths. The point about a selective test, surely, is to select - if they made everything comfortable for the children taking it then you would have lots of children passing and not enough places, even in a county like Kent, which is far better served (over-served) for Grammar Schools!

I take your point, but the VR section of the test doesn't contain any maths does it? So I think the problem is that this type of test would favour children with strong vocab and literacy skills ahead of those with strong maths ability.

A child with excellent vocab and literacy and average maths would still likely get a good overall score and pass. Whereas a child with average literacy and excellent maths might struggle because they might get a poorer maths score than expected because they get tripped up by some words in it they don't know.

[kenyancowgirl]

CEM does favour those with stronger literacy skills in our area, Proud_Dad! The scores for Maths and NVR are added together and then averaged to get one score and this is then added to the total score for VR. As each of the 3 areas are each effectively weighted to 100 (which you would assume gives a total standardised of 300) by combining and averaging the scores for NVR and Maths, the total standardised is actually out of 200. As there is a strong correlation between mathematical ability and NVR, by allowing VR to make up 50% of the total, they are favouring literacy skills over mathematical ones.

Fundamentally my point is this - everyone is in the same boat - you cannot get wound up about vocab, either in the maths paper or the VR paper - if you are going the selective route, your child has to be good at everything to pass the test. I am not a supporter of entry at 11+, ****'s teeth, I'm not even a supporter of selective education per se. The point is, the test at 11 is NOT fair. It is not fair period, so it seems daft to start complaining about the minutae within the test when most people would agree that testing at 11, on one day, at one time is not particularly fair.

[mystery]

But some tests are fairer than others. You shouldn't have a test of maths, english comprehension, english vocabulary, VR and NVR where all the subtests depend on a huge English vocabulary throughout. If C E M does that, it shouldn't.

Hopefully it doesn't. Test compilers should be a little more logical in their approach.