State Standards for Mathematics

Problem-Attic supports four different sets of standards for math: Common Core (CCSS-M), Texas (TEKS), Virginia (SOLs) and Oklahoma (OAS).

The Common Core database contains more than 25,000 questions for grades 1–8 and high school. Approximately 6500 of them are free-response, multi-step and open-ended. (Most of the others, which are multiple-choice, can be converted automatically to free-response.) All questions are original and are included in a school subscription. For more details and sample questions, please click here.

For individual states, you can click the links below to view the number of questions by standard and to download a few hundred samples.

While the databases have been customized for the specific state standards, they do share certain design characteristics:

• All questions are hand-written by highly qualified teachers and curriculum specialists. (They are not algorithm-generated or “crowd-sourced”.) In addition, they are carefully aligned, edited and reviewed by EducAide Software, which has 20 years of experience developing questions for state standards.

• The database is intended for both instruction and assessment. Alignment to the standards is as tight as possible while still allowing some flexibility for teaching, not just testing. While questions function very well for measuring student progress, in accordance with the standards, some questions are included for challenge, extra credit, and extending ideas.

• Questions are aligned to only one standard. There is no duplication. For questions that can conceivably go with multiple standards, we went for the best fit. We also tried to keep similar questions together, so that it’s not necessary to jump through multiple standards to find variations.

• All questions are paired for easy pre- and post-testing, makeup tests, etc. You will not notice this on the sample documents, but if you visit the Play Area, it will be apparent that two questions in-a-row are always similar. This provides a nice balance between repetition and variety and also helps with test security, as the two questions, which are close in difficulty and style, can be assigned to different students and graded the same way.
  Note: Problem-Attic has a new option called “parallel forms” that takes advantage of the paired questions. You can very quickly create pre- and post-tests, makeup tests, forms A and B, etc. More details are here.

• The questions are rich with graphics and interesting scenarios, including real-world data. With the editor, you can use all of this as stimulus for new questions. The process is facilitated with a button in the editor labeled “Duplicate”. Also, Problem-Attic is smart enough not to repeat certain figures or text which is marked as an “intro”, if it appears in successive questions.

All of the questions for state standards are original. There is no overlap with other parts of Problem-Attic, such as NY Regents exams or state released tests. There is some overlap in coverage between the state standards, but each has a large quantity of original questions. For example, for Oklahoma, about one-fourth of the questions are not used again for Common Core, Texas or Virginia.

The state standards questions are available with a school subscription. Please note that a subscription serves teachers in all core subject areas. Although the state-specific questions are, at this time, for math only, the additional for-pay options in Problem-Attic are great for science, social studies, and ELA. These features include online testing, slideshow creation, export to an LMS, scoring, and editing. You can try these features in the Play Area and learn about the technology side of Problem-Attic here.