HOME > FCAT EXPLORER PROGRAMS > 5th GRADE MATH > GENERAL INFORMATION: MATH STATION

Math Station: 5th Grade Benchmarks is a program that helps students prepare for the FCAT. The program provides FCAT-like questions that students can use to practice the math skills tested on the 5th grade FCAT.

Guided Learning to Strengthen Skills

Math Station features guided learning to reinforce and improve students' skills. After every practice question, students receive immediate instructional feedback. The feedback lets students know right away why an answer choice was right or wrong. In addition, students can review explanations of the skills being practiced.

Types of Practice Questions with Guided Learning

The program has several types of practice questions that feature guided learning: multiple choice, gridded response, and charted response.

Multiple Choice (MC)

• Multiple-choice questions allow a student to choose from four possible answers.
• If a student selects the correct answer, the student receives instructional feedback telling the student why the selected answer is correct. The feedback helps the student recognize and answer similar questions in the future.
• If a student responds incorrectly, the student receives a hint that guides the student toward the correct answer. The student then has the opportunity to try the question again.
• If the student responds incorrectly a second time, the program provides a full explanation of the solution.

Gridded Response (GR)

• Gridded-response questions require students to type their answers in a blank grid, rather than select from a series of multiple-choice answers. Because the student must supply the entire answer, a student cannot guess to solve the problem.
• To answer gridded-response questions, students must use many of the same complex skills that they will have to apply when creating written responses on the FCAT for short-response (SR) and extended-response (ER) performance tasks.
• Gridded-response questions provide the same guided learning feedback as multiple-choice questions.

Charted Response (GR)

• Charted-response questions ask students to create a chart. Students must drag and drop the correct chart title and axis labels. Also, students must click chart columns to create color bars that correctly display the information in the problem.
• Students are provided with feedback explaining the question's solution.

Special Features

• A built-in glossary helps students better understand math concepts from the math questions. To access the glossary, students can click any of the bold-type glossary words in the math questions. Students can see a definition of the selected word and hear the word pronounced.
• Educational games offer students an entertaining way to further practice their math skills. In addition, the games provide an incentive for students to complete FCAT Explorer materials because students can only earn game tokens by correctly answering practice problems.
• The Explorer's Report allows students to see their performance on the practice questions. The report may be sorted by performance for the current day, week, or year.
• The Challenge List provides each student with a list of links to the practice problems answered incorrectly by the student. Each student can use the Challenge List to further practice the skills that are more difficult for the student.