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How My Family Benefited from Standardized Testing

January 10, 2018 by Megan

standardized testing bubbles
Have you ever wondered if your homeschooled child is falling behind? One of the challenges of homeschooling is that it is difficult to know whether or not your child is on track academically. I found this to be true in my own homeschool.

My two oldest children are different in almost every way possible. Their personalities are different, their hair color is different, their likes and dislikes are different—and their academic strengths are different. My firstborn learned to read quickly. When we sat down to read the phonics stories in K5, she always read them with ease and had no trouble answering the accompanying comprehension questions. By the end of K5, she was reading short chapter books. I had no worries about her academic performance—I knew she was excelling.

But then my second daughter started K5. Unlike her older sister, she struggled through those K5 phonics stories and word family lists. No matter how much we practiced, she didn’t seem to be catching on. And I began to get worried. Was she falling behind? Did she need a reading tutor? A different curriculum?

An Objective Measurement

Standardized testing was so helpful to me in this situation because it provided me with an objective measure of my daughter’s academic performance. Instead of comparing her performance with only her sister’s, the results compared my daughter with a much larger group of other kindergartners (called a norm).  I felt like she was falling behind, but her standardized test results indicated that she was actually right on track.

A Sense of Assurance

You could compare doing standardized testing with getting a checkup at the doctor’s office. At those doctor’s visits, I’m always interested in knowing if my children are staying on their growth curve. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to me that they have gained much weight or gotten much taller, so it is always reassuring to me when my pediatrician shows me that they are still developing normally.

It’s the same with standardized testing. Such tests aren’t a perfect measurement, so they shouldn’t be the only assessment tool you use to evaluate your child’s academic performance. Throughout the year, you can also use chapter tests, section quizzes, lesson interactivity, and projects to evaluate learning. But yearly standardized testing can be very beneficial, especially when you need assurance that your child is staying on track.

Help in Identifying Academic Weaknesses

Standardized test scores are also useful because they help you discern if your child is falling behind. Since standardized tests are no-stakes tests, you don’t have to be afraid of poor test scores—they don’t mean that you’re a homeschool failure, just as a medical diagnosis doesn’t mean that you’ve failed as a parent. And low test scores don’t mean that your child is somehow unintelligent. They should only be viewed as opportunities for growth and improvement. If you need help knowing how to reinforce academically weak areas, your local HomeWorks consultant or a BJU Press representative is available to assist you.

My children and I really look forward to standardized testing each spring. For me, it’s an opportunity to give them an academic checkup. For them, it’s a chance to get together with friends and enjoy special snacks and extra playtime. Keep an eye out for Jenna’s next post, in which she will share some ideas for making testing fun and stress-free so it can be a great experience for everyone.

Filed Under: Successful Learning Tagged With: achievement testing, benefits of testing, standardized testing, test results, test scores

How to Plan Your School Year

August 13, 2015 by BJU Press Writer

BJU Press student textbooks with teacher lesson plan book

“Planning your work and working your plan” helps with more than scheduling your errands—it can make a big difference in organizing your teaching too. Whether you homeschool your children or teach a classroom of students, you probably begin each school year armed with a plan. It’s much easier to complete the different subjects and lessons when you have a plan to follow.

What should you consider when creating next year’s academic road map? Here are two ideas to get you started.

1. Start at the beginning.

A great place to start planning your lessons is by looking at the beginning of your textbooks. Review the table of contents in each textbook to see how it is paced and when concepts are presented. You’ll also want to see if your curriculum provides any lesson objectives or goals. Some of our BJU Press textbooks present the goals or objectives at the beginning of the textbook and others at the beginning of each chapter. Make sure to take good notes on what you find and consult your school calendar—you don’t want to start a harder concept right before a break.

2. Personalize to meet your student’s needs.

To tailor your plan, check your students’ test scores. Test scores are incredibly useful for showing strengths and weaknesses, letting you know what to spend more or less time on when teaching.

  • The percentile ranks and stanines at the top of the score report show your student’s overall ranking in a subject or as a whole.
  • The lower half of the score report shows a close-up of your student’s performance with specific skills. Check the number of questions that were available for each skill, and how many your student attempted. Missing 25% of only four questions means your student missed one question; missing 25% on a section of twelve questions would be more significant.

Tip—Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you’re not sure what the test scores mean, need help pinpointing a possible weakness, or can’t find your test scores, talk to your achievement test provider. Our Testing & Evaluation service provides customers with unlimited access to test score reports, and staff members are happy to answer questions or consult on score results. Your test provider may offer the same service, so be sure to ask.

Apply your findings

For your student’s strengths, it’s okay to move more quickly through new material, include projects that encourage your student to apply his knowledge, or do a bit of both. For his weaknesses, it’s best to plan on spending more time reviewing old concepts and explaining new ones.

How do you usually plan for the school year?

• • • • •

Joanna received her BA and MA from BJU and worked at BJU Press Testing & Evaluation for over 19 years. She currently edits elementary science materials for BJU Press.

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Filed Under: Simplified Homeschool Tagged With: academic planning, achievement testing, homeschool, objectives, planning, teaching strategies, test results, testing

Understanding testing terms

March 20, 2014 by Carolynn

Every year, achievement testing season rolls around. As a child, I enjoyed testing. It meant new pencils, special snacks, and fun games. I didn’t have to worry about interpreting the test scores. Now, after studying assessments in grad school and working with people who dedicate their lives to testing, I realize how complicated the results can be. It’s hard to remember what all the terms and abbreviations mean, isn’t it?

So this month, I’ll share some testing terms and their definitions with you. I hope they help you and your children have a great testing season.

image of a door sign that says "understanding your testing results"

Norm

When a child takes a standardized test, his scores are compared to what is called the norm. Basically, the norm is the scores of a sample group of children that took the same test. They took the test before this year so that their scores are available for comparison.

National Percentile Rank

Also known as the percentile rank, this ranks your child’s scores against the norm’s scores. When your child takes a test, his scores are compared to the norm to see how he did. If he is placed in the 80 percentile then he scored as well or better than 80% of the students in the norm group.

Stanine

Stanine may be referred to as NS on your test results. It’s another grading scale that goes from 1-9. Low scores are in the 1-3 range, 4-6 indicates medium scores, and 7-9 scores are considered high. It’s a quick way to see which “group” your child scored in.

Grade Equivalent

I remember learning about grade equivalents in one of my grad classes. It’s easy to misunderstand but fascinating once you understand it.  (I misunderstood it before learning how to read it.) Basically, the GE tells you what level of student (grade level) your child scored the same as. So if your fourth-grader has a  7.2 GE on his math test, it means he scored the same as an average seventh-grade student who took the same test in his second month of seventh grade. It doesn’t mean that your fourth-grader should be in seventh grade. That would be great though! Just remember that it’s not comparing your child to his peers but correlating his score with other scores regardless of grade level.

Note: You may see PHS in the GE column. That stands for Post High School, and again it doesn’t mean that your child is ready to attend college, just that he scored higher than the average high school senior.

What other testing terms do you find confusing or hard to remember?

Filed Under: Simplified Homeschool Tagged With: achievement testing, assessments, Christian school, homeschool, test results

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