room at the top

I've been out practicing some amateur data mining.

Fun!

Fordham has a write-up of the new NAEP report. (pdf file) Mike Petrilli talks about it here:

[A]nalysts followed a representative group of students who graduated from middle school in 1988 and, as high-school seniors, took a math test the results of which could be equated to the NAEP's scale. (Students were followed until 2000, when they were about 26 years old.)

Four scores were possible on the test: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Kids scoring Proficient or Advanced in 12th grade almost universally went on to attend and graduate college. That's a correlation, not a cause, but on the other hand it does tell me that my kid will be attending college with kids who know some math.

You can find an incomprehensible description of the levels is here. (incomprehensible to me, that is)

Sample questions from Below Basic through Advanced are here.

I took time to do a couple of the Advanced questions, and I'm not looking too bad I don't think -- entirely thanks to Saxon Math, Algebra 1 & 2 (the first two books of his high school trilogy, "Advanced Mathematics" being the third).

I'm proud to report that, thanks to Saxon, I was able to solve this problem:

If ƒ(x) = x2 + x and g(x) = 2x + 7, what is an expression for ƒ(g(x)) ?

Before working my way through Saxon, I had never seen or heard of a function; nor had I seen function notation.

I taught it to myself using Saxon, the lesson on function notation in Paul Foerster's Algebra 1, and the lesson at Purplemath.

I still find the notation itself a bit confusing, but that's because I need more practice.

more anon


update: wrong, again

This item falls under "proficient," not "advanced."

I'll have to see whether I can do the advanced items.

At this point, I think two Saxon books probably take me to the top of Proficient, and possibly into Advanced.

But I'll have to check.