Education

Puerto Rican Students Fare Poorly in Math on NAEP

By Mary Ann Zehr — December 10, 2008 1 min read
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I’m concluding from my colleague Kathleen Kennedy Manzo’s article, “Puerto Rico Attains Low NAEP Scores,” published today that educators aren’t likely to see really strong math skills among many English-language learners moving from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States.

The article says that students on the island struggled to answer most of the questions on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in math, administered in 2007. The students took the test in Spanish. Ms. Manzo notes that some education officials in Puerto Rico have written a letter to the U.S. Department of Education arguing that problems with the translation of the test as well as cultural bias in the test may be the cause for some of the low scores. Dec. 11 Update: The Associated Press has more about that issue here.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.