5 minute read
Back to School
SET TING STANDARDS
How to survive the stream of mandatory testing
B Y J E N N Y P E T E R S O N
IF YOU WERE TO PLACE THE QUESTION “name something related to school” on a “Family Feud” board, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t guess “tests.”
While school and tests have always gone hand-in-hand, testing for students goes well beyond the quizzes personally created by teachers.
Standardized tests have become a regular part of students’ lives at school. Louisiana public school students take day-long standardized tests every year in every grade from kindergarten through high school.
These tests come in a variety of acronyms depending on the grade level — DIBELS, STEEP, STEP, LEAP — all versions of Louisiana’s interpretation of a federal mandate to test proficiency. Add in the ACT and SAT tests for those who are college-bound, and you’ll find students are sharpening their No. 2 pencils multiple times every year.
Michelle Douglas, who runs several K-8 schools as the CEO of Hynes Charter School Corp., says assessment tests shouldn’t be a stressful time. Instead, it should merely be a continuation of the curriculum students are already learning and preparing for every day.
“You can’t change something the morning they’re getting assessed or cram for it,” Douglas says. “This creates panic. If your school has a curriculum that helps teach those standards day in and day out, and teachers are well trained and supported, kids will do fine on the LEAP. That’s why it’s essential from the moment students walk in the door, even work with them and their parents to help them. We’re able to do more things early on to get them on track,” Douglas says. “Do they need glasses? Do they need more support? Are they attending school every day?”
Douglas says the state recently mandated K-3 teachers take 48 hours of professional development on the science of reading, which helps teachers better understand how students learn through explicit instruction. First, children learn to read; then, they read to learn or interact with the world.
“You hear a lot about what’s shifted in math with a lot of ‘explain your answer and tell why.’ You have to be a good communicator,” Douglas says.
She offers some tips for caregivers to help their child master important skills that can help on standardized tests:
from a very young age, to teach these skills.”
There are many ways to measure academic performance, and annual state tests are only one of them. Even within an assessment test, there’s an absolute performance score and growth performance score that measures how much a student has improved, which is often a more useful metric. Together, these measures can give families and schools a more complete picture of a student’s performance so they can better support learning at home.
“We are constantly looking at data. Each quarter, we give an assessment, and if a student isn’t progressing, we watch them and ENCOURAGE COMPLETE SENTENCES IN CONVERSATIONS
“Complete sentences lead to written complete thoughts, and a thoughtful, articulate young person will be able express their answers on assessments,” she says.
PHOTO BY TEVAR AK / GET TY IMAGES
PLAY CARD GAMES
Cards are a great way to teach math, especially battle, where you each throw a card down and the higher card takes both cards on the table.
INVOLVE READING AT EVERY CHANCE
In addition to reading books at home, encourage young students to read street signs and business store names while in the car.
WORK EVERYDAY MATH INTO CONVERSATIONS
“If you’re going to the grocery store, involve your child,” Douglas says. “Maybe say, ‘We need to make enough red beans and rice for three families. How many cups of water will we need?’”
WIDEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Douglas says another perspective is to view standardized tests not so much as a “test,” but as an important benchmark for everyone to learn and grow from. It’s the school’s opportunity to get its own report card and learn its students’ proficiency to better equip teachers.
PHOTO BY DANIEL DE L A HOZ / GET TY IMAGES
Withsomeassessmenttests, there’sanabsoluteperformance scoreandgrowthperformance scorethatmeasureshowmucha studenthasimproved.
Younger students preparing for SAT and ACT tests
taking the landmark act and sat tests can be
stressful, with scores determining admission and merit-based scholarships for colleges and universities.
Stewart Rowe is the Southeast market director with The Princeton Review, an education services company that provides tutoring, test preparation and admission resources. He says there have been more requests from parents of middle schoolers to begin prepping for the ACT and SAT tests.
“The No. 1 thing that we hear is the stress and the competitiveness for the ‘right school,’” Rowe says. “We see lots of families start to work with their children in middle school to set them up for success once they enter high school. We have middle schoolers who will join us to take a practice test of the SAT and ACT to start getting a feel for it.”
The Princeton Review holds many courses to learn curriculum and testing strategies. Area high schools also offer test prep for their high school students to gain an edge. Jesuit High School, for example, offers ACT and SAT prep classes to all Catholic high school students three times a year.
“We do need (SAT and ACT tests) or some constant metric by which all students can fall onto a continuum, because GPAs are so different and course requirements at high schools are so different. However, I don’t think that these tests are predictive of a student’s success in high school, nor are they predictive of their college experience, nor do they tell the whole story of a student,” Rowe says. “They measure how well that student takes that test on that day. It’s all about strategy.”
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