Sunday, June 1, 2014

Twins and Testing

Twins are always interesting. Mine of course are boy/girl twins so we don't have the typical identical twin stuff going on. Other than sharing the same birthday and parents, they are not really all that much alike most of the time. They have a bond, but not super close like with identical twins.
They came into the orphanage at 20 months old, December 2006.

And they were together in baby room 2 for a while.

But once they got old enough to move out back into the boys and girls' rooms, they weren't together at night anymore. I don't know if they understood that they were siblings and twins among all the kids there or not.




Kayla is much more advanced than Kaleb socially. She's also several inches taller and several pounds heavier. Kaleb, however, seems to understand math concepts much better than Kayla when it comes to homework and in class work. Their grades other than math are pretty much the same. They are in different schools though and are not necessarily doing all the same things so it's hard to know how they would compare if they had the same teacher at the same school.

So what I find kind of interesting/strange is their FCAT scores. There are five different levels with 5 being the highest. For third grade the students only had to score a level 2 in reading to pass third grade. They both scored a 3. They did not have to pass the math part to move on to 4th.

Normally there is a certain score, not level that you need to pass the FCAT. I'm sure most of you are familiar with tests like this because I think all the states have state-wide standardized tests now.

For the reading part of the test, Kaleb scored  205 and Kayla scored 206. For the math part, Kaleb scored 191 and Kayla scored 190. It's interesting to me that out of hundreds of points, they were within one point of each other for both reading and math. And added together, the score is the same. Each test had several sections. For reading, those numbers were almost identical. They scored higher and lower on different parts of the math test, but it came out almost the same overall. 

So I guess that means that overall they are very close in ability and testing strategies. If there were identical twins I might expect that more than with twins who are no more similar genetically than any two siblings born to the same parents.

Anyone else have twins?

4 comments:

Hevel said...

We have almost-11-year-old identical twin boys (bio) and 5-year-old boy/girl twins (adopted). I found that my identical twins differ more in their strengths and weaknesses than the fraternal twins. I think being an identical twin any small difference is embraced as a sign of individuality that these get developed more. We have very little standardized testing till the Bagrut, but while both boys test well, their result profiles differ. Except when we do grade level tests, where they both tend to score 100%.

Our little twins are just starting 1st grade in September, but their pre-school tests showed similar development level ,

Kathy Cassel said...

An interesting comparison Hevel. Part of our difference is that the twins were in an orphanage and were in separate rooms at night and I'm not sure if they were treated as twins as far as the nannys keeping them together or encouraging that bond.

Emily said...

Three cheers for Level 3! Did you get Jasmine's scores back yet? Oh my, did I pray for her during FCAT week! I know how important Band is for her.

Kathy Cassel said...

No news on Jasmine yet. I'm a bit more concerned about the civics EOC because it's pass/fail and I'm guess that would take the place of her elective too.