Survived the first round of PARCC!

This week my students took the PBA tests.  I have to say it seemed to go quickly and pretty painlessly despite having a snow day on Thursday!
I was really good about not peeking at their screens, but I was able to get a lot of info out of the monitoring software, I could see who and how many kids skipped questions and I was scared by how quickly some of my students answered questions until I realized that they might have been doing the work on paper and then going back in and entering the answers.
I was really happy to see a lot of bar modeling and KWI charts going on in the scrap papers, hopefully those strategies helped them out.
Some of the negatives I noticed, one of my students forgot how to drag and drop and I couldn't tell her how to do it, therefore she couldn't answer a question on the ELA portion that she knew the answer to.  For the math portion students had different number of questions which confused the heck out of them.  Also for the ELA part some had 3 passages to read and others had 2 passages and a video.  One student asked me, "what if I can't understand what they are saying on the video"  I felt so bad that I couldn't check it out and help him out.

I am happy that I was able to convince my students not to stress about the test because it doesn't mean anything for them, but to take it seriously anyway.  It seems that that is exactly what they did.