NY Regents science questions organized for the Core Curriculum

Problem-Attic has a new feature called public (or installable) frameworks. These are a way of customizing the database for a textbook, teaching units, state standards, etc.

This page describes four frameworks which are a re-organization of Regents science questions to New York State's Core Curriculum. They cover Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science, and Living Environment. They’re intended for teachers in New York, but any user of Problem-Attic can install the frameworks.

Instructions for installing the frameworks are here. The actual installation is done from here. If you’re interested in building your own framework, or you want to learn how to customize the Problem-Attic database for a specific purpose, please see the section further down.

Overview of the science frameworks

The science frameworks were created by EducAide Software, the company behind Problem-Attic. Briefly, they’re a way of looking at the exam questions organized around the Core Curriculum standards and key ideas. They cover all exams from 2001/2002 through August 2022.

The number of questions varies between subjects, from about 2000 for Physics to nearly 5000 for Earth Science. For all subjects except Living Environment, the questions are organized around 21 standards; for Living Environment, that number drops to 15. As a result, there’s considerable variation in the number of questions per standard, as you can see in the tables below.

We recognize that the Core Curriculum is somewhat obsolete. Regents Exams are changing over to the New York State Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS), and the administration of new exams will start in June 2025. We believe the frameworks are still useful for a few reasons:

• They show how Problem-Attic’s database can be re-organized around a specific curriculum.

• They are a historical record of which parts of the curriculum were emphasized on the Regents exams.

• They may help with the re-organization of past exam questions for the new science standards.

More details about the frameworks

The following notes apply to all four of the science frameworks.

• When building the frameworks, EducAide relied on the curriculum map at the end of the rating guide for each exam. It’s possible we made some data entry mistakes, but we didn’t try to do our own match-up of questions and standards, or second-guess what’s in the curriculum maps.

• In the curriculum maps, many questions are aligned to more than one standard. In fact, across all four subjects, the ratio is 1.8 standards per question. You’ll see this in the charts below, which provide a breakdown.

• For Chemistry and Earth Science in particular, there’s a huge variance in coverage. There are thousands of questions aligned to just a few standards, and less than a dozen questions for others. The curriculum maps don’t provide any further breakdown, but some enterprising science teachers might want to do that.

• For all four frameworks, the questions are shown in chronological order on Problem-Attic’s selection pages. By default, oldest questions are on top. If you prefer the newest on top, click the Up/Down blue arrow, which you’ll see when viewing the questions. The arrow reverses the sort order.

• With installed frameworks, you can select questions in a normal way. If you’re not familiar with the right-click option for selecting at random, please see this page. For frameworks with very large categories, random selection may be a useful shortcut.

Breakdown of coverage

The following tables show the distribution of questions by standard (or key idea). Keep in mind that many questions are aligned to more than one standard. For that reason, the total number of aligned questions exceeds the number of unique, exam questions.

Building your own framework

For instructions on building your own framework, see this help page. Also, in case you didn’t know, Problem-Attic has new hierarchy import and alignment tools which greatly speed up the process of creating documents and adding problems to them.

Please contact us if you need any assistance with framework building or installing a public framework. We welcome your comments and suggestions for improving those which are now available.