H2 oh no!
Barely half of New York state’s public school eighth graders were able to correctly identify the atoms in a molecule of water on national science exams last year, test officials said this morning.
Just 54 percent of students here picked the correct combination — 2 atoms of hydrogen and 1 of oxygen — out of four options given for a multiple-choice question on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The same percentage of students nationally got the right answer.
While 16 states and the nation as a whole made gains on the eighth grade science exams last year compared to 2009, New York’s scores were stagnant.
Just 29 percent of New York students scored proficiently on the challenging science exams last year, compared to 31 percent in 2009.
That difference was not statistically significant, according to testing officials.
On a scale of 300, New York scored two points lower than the national public school average of 151 points.
Of the participants, there were 29 states or jurisdictions that scored higher than New York last year, 13 whose scores were similar and just 9 that fared worse.
A representative sample of 122,000 eighth graders nationally were tested last year on the NAEP exams — often referred to as the gold standard – in the areas of physical science, life science, and Earth and space sciences.
Results for city students weren’t available.
But The Post recently reported that city eighth graders haven’t boosted their performance on annual science exams administered by the state since at least 2003.
The state tests identified 53 percent of the city’s eighth graders as proficient in science last year.