OFF TOPIC - any experts on the Iowa tests

That's just it! some stuff appears to be reasonable and others poor.

I know a former administrator - I might just ask her.

Cheryl

ROFLMAO Karen, That sounds like me! I wonder how many of us there are on this group who 'think outside the box'? I had a real way of doing that, as did my mom (she was doing university night courses all through my childhood). Being a single mom, we came to class (and therefore exam review) with her. In Senior kindergarden (in Canada you do/did 2 years), the teacher wanted to hold me back and called a meeting with my mom. She said I 'couldn't even sit in a circle for group instruction, there's no way she'll be able to handle first grade'. So mom asked what they were teaching. Response: the alphabet. I'll show a picture of a letter, ask if anyone knows what it is, say the letter... Mom just about killed herself laughing. I'd been reading for a year already. I wouldn't sit in the circle because I was bored silly! After they tested me and found it was true, they wanted to bump me up to the first grade class, but mom wouldn't let them as I was already younger than everyone in my grade and she didn't want me to have problems with being even younger as I got older. Thanks mom! :) And to the mom who said there are many kids that are 7 and 8 years old in first grade, was that a typo? I turned 6 in first grade, and it wasn't that long ago (I'm 30). I was always youngest in the class (having a December birthday), but not by that much! Have they really shifted the ages that much? Heather WIP: Noah's Sub (more than 3/4 finished! Wohoo!)

They're now leaving it up to the parents to decide when the children are ready instead of mandating that "all children who turn 5 by December 1,

And I'm sure, 13 years from now, college admissions committees will be applying different standards to kids who started kindergarten at 7 and then got a 4.0 average, the same as they have always applied different standards to kids who got their 4.0 taking Advanced Placement classes. Don't think you can put one over on a college admissions committee; they notice everything.

So, you said spelling was an area she didn't do well on, but her spelling grades in class are good? If so, are the words she's spelling in class comparable to the spelling words on the test? And how is spelling tested on the test? Do they have to spell words given orally by the proctor? Or do they pick out misspelled words from a sentence? Or do they pick the correct spelling from a list of variations? And how does that compare with how she is tested on spelling in school? With the word analysis, it appears that much of the test is read by the proctor and/or involves pictures, rather than words or letters. Perhaps she's fine with reading and writing, but struggles to get it on an oral test. Ultimately, you have to figure out whether she is scoring low because she doesn't have the skills they're testing, or whether she is scoring low because something about the test itself presents an obstacle to her demonstrating skills she does have. Interpreting the test scores themselves may not be of much use in that, because ultimately, she got wrong what she got wrong and you still have to figure out *why* she got it wrong.

Best wishes, Ericka

"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...

It's very common for children to do well in spelling class, yet do poorly on the spelling section of the test. Yes, the questioning format is usually much different than they would encounter in class. But the other thing you have to think about is most likely students are given a list of ten words and on Friday have to write them correctly on the paper. If you think about it, this does not at all test spelling ability, it tests the ability to remember that set of ten spelled words and write them again a few days later. Many many children are good at this...it's the way things have been taught for a long time. I'm not saying your daughter can't spell, it may be that she is just unfamiliar with they way spelling is tests; it also may be that she's good at memorizing lists. We don't really teach how to spell and strategies for spelling, we just teach lists and lists of words. Hopefully this will change as we get more and more next generation teachers. I've asked my mother, who is a teacher, if they learned in school different ways to help children learn and she says they really didn't learn a lot of the things they teach education students now. Back then it was how to teach like most of us have been taught. I'm sure you all can remember some horrendous teachers who didn't care about how you learned the material, or if you learned the material; they only cared that you could regurgitate the information on the test. In my opinion, the ability to regurgitate is not evidence of learning. Think about it, most everyone here could memorize the Pythagorean Theorem, but how many of us would actually know how to plug actual numbers into it, and then how many of us would really know the meaning of it and why the theorem works, and then how many of us would see a practical use of it. I believe we're going to do a much better job educating our students if we actually try different strategies to teach them, and also teach our students different learning strategies so they can learn independently, or so they can reason out standardized tests., whatever true value those have... And yes, Erika may have a good point: if you can see what type of questions she is missing then perhaps you can teach her strategies to deal with those types of questions. Sara L., who is in her last semester of a masters degree in education

I have been reading this thread with interest. When I was at school, part of the curriculum was to teach us how to take tests and exams. This was nothing to do with "playing the rules", to somehow get an unfair advantage over other students, but just doing sensible things. I taught my children similar things, and my son noted that when he was in college, several of his contemporaries had no idea how to appraoch and write exams; sometimes with disasterous results.

-- Jim Cripwell. A volante tribe of bards on earth are found,/ who, while the flattering zephyrs round them play,/ on "coignes of vantage" build their nests of clay;/ how quickly from that aery hold unbound,/ dust for oblivion!/ To the solid ground/ of nature trusts the mind that builds for aye. Wordsworth.

I'm one of those parents who made a point of holding my son back, and it wasn't to give him advantages over anyone else in sports or academics; it was because I knew him better, personality-wise, than his teacher or any standardized test could measure. His birthday is October 30, and he would have been eligible to start first grade before he turned six. But first grade is very demanding on a lot of levels, especially if you consider the stress of interacting with a large number of other people for a LOT of hours in the day.

He attended public school 1/2-day kindergarten, starting just before his fifth birthday, and then I did a lot of research about school readiness and decided to give him a "growth year" in a pre-first class. Best investment of time/money I ever made in my life, I still believe. At the end of kindergarten year, his teacher said "he scored very high on reading tests, but he still sucks on the cuffs of his sleeves and his collar when we're doing circle time." I told her I was sending him to pre-first, and she just couldn't understand why: the reading scores were high, he'd do fine. And I said, "But listen to what you just told me! He's not socially ready to be comfortable in the large-group setting; there's more to school success than academics."

There's SO much more to school than just knowing the alphabet, etc. There's the ability to sit for hours and hours, the ability to function in a roomful of distractions, the ability to deal with umpteen personalities at once. I wish people wouldn't rush their kids into one-size-fits-all education. I'm truly worried about the current "push" to put all pre-kindergarteners into all-day, full-sized class settings. They're not child-centric, and I don't think they're necessarily child-friendly!

Sue

Karen E wrote: Did she say whether

Could it be as simple as she got "off" by one on the answer sheet, and so nothing matched? If she missed aligning one dot, then everything after that would have been off. Maybe the school could show you her specific test results.

I remember taking the Iowa tests, and my one friend who HATED them. Extremely bright girl (she's now a lawyer/law review editor). Her memory of the test was "Here's an imaginary continent: Where is it?" and she'd scream back, "It's in your MIND, stupid!" That was in the geography section, and you were supposed to surmise where it was based on longitude, latitude, etc - none of which we'd ever learned in class! (I seem to remember multiple-choice answers involving the "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn" - which were books, not places, LOL!) So one year (seventh grade?) she just "colored in the dots", without even reading the questions, and scored 70%. Which probably looked really alarming, what with her 99% in other sections! We STILL laugh about that!

Sue

Actually, the Tropic of Cancer is north of the Equator, and the Tropic of Capricorn is south of the Equator, 23.5 degrees either north or south, respectively.

Hi Sue, I don't know if you got to read my whole original post, but later on, I tell about my mom being recommended to skip me up a grade to make me even younger than the rest. She refused, and I am absolutely grateful for it. I had a hard enough time fitting in as it was (being younger than everyone, always at a new school (10 schools by grade 10!) and smart), and I'd really hate to think what it would have been like had I been a whole year younger than I was. Your son was close to the cutoff, and I'm grateful, on his behalf, that you chose to do the harder thing and give him that extra year. And I think it was likely a harder thing to chose to do that to just "go with the flow" (or the teacher's recommendations). I just think that maybe being 8 years old when you start first grade is a little *too* old... and I was surprised by it. Heather

Heather, I wasn't trying to comment on your particular situation, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. I was just trying to make the point (and the same point that you made) that *parents* have to be the advocates for their children because they know their child's strengths and weaknesses best, and NOT settle for a one-size-fits-all, "go with the flow" education. What I'm sensing from "No Child Left Behind" reform is that a LOT of children will be left behind, because it's basically proposing "round pegs into square holes." (I.e., if you hit it hard enough, it'll eventually go through? No thought to what gets broken off in the process.) It sees children as little "products" that quality control can optimize without regard to individuality.

I don't think there's a big conspiracy of parents holding their kids back so they'll appear smarter or bigger than their counterparts. I wanted to say that there are *legitimate* reasons to hold back. And in our society of "more is better" and "the younger they do it, the smarter they are", that's countercultural.

Sue

And I didn't mean there's a "big" conspiracy, either, but there are some parents locally who have told the media this was their intention in having little Johnny start kindergarten at 6 or 7 or 29, so that he'd be smarter or more likely to make the basketball team because he's taller.

Well, does she enjoy going to school? I mean generally, everybody has days when we just don't want to leave the house ;-) Does she like her teachers? Does she have friends at school?

If she likes going to school and learning you haven't done the wrong thing ;-)

Ok, I have no Idea what this test is. However, having a son with a speech development delay, I know how hard it is for my son to understand complex sentences especially when there are "difficult" words in them. I'm not saying your child has a speech "problem", but I'm wondering if you had ever had her hearing ability tested? I know lots of children with hearing problems show little signs of them because they can compensate really well by interpreting body language etc.

I really don't want to tread on your toes, I know how difficult it is when ones child suddenly doesn't seem "normal" because of some test scores. I have had so many different opinions coming my way when Sam didn't start speaking when he was supposed to. There was everything from "give him time" to "get him to a specialist hand have them run every test on him they can", so I'm trying not to do that ;-)

But I personally think she will need some kind of help, if it's just "exam anxiety" she really needs to learn some techniques to calm herself so she can show what she knows. If it's a "hearing/speech" problem she needs help working that problem out. She will need to take many exams in the years to come and reading, writing, listening, speaking is inceredibly important, if she sould really need help in those areas it's much better to give help now than to wait and hope it'll correct itself.

Also: I have decided that for my son it's much less trouble putting him into a specialized school when he's 6 or 7 so he can get a good start with lots of help, than to put him into a normal school where he will most likely not get the help he needs and deserves and then end up with him not being able to go to a "higher" school when he finishes his first

I know special ed sounds scary and leaves a really bad taste in ones mouth, but special ed in first/second/third grade is better than bad grades in highschool due to unresolved problems in the first few years of school.

take care nicole

I had a history teacher who took time out of her class one day to teach us how to take HER tests (which were representative of most tests). She would have a section each for fill-in-the-blank, multiple guess (both types), true/false, and essay type questions.

The things that always stayed with me about that were these:

1. Look in the test questions for other test answers, because sometimes they were there if you knew where to look.
2. The secret to starting a good essay answer was to make the question your thesis, e.g., "Why was the American Revolution begun?" "The American Revolution was begun because..."

Is she slightly dyslexic? Not enough to bother her reading, but enough to throw her spelling off completely? My reading scores were always off the charts, but to this day, I can't spell to save my life. If I use an obscure word in lecture and someone asks me to spell it, I have to write it on the board to do so. And even then, sometimes I'll have to write it a few ways to do get it right. Some days, even the right spelling looks wrong to me. I don't post to Usenet without a dictionary sitting right by my elbow. And I frequently transpose the fifth and sixth digits of people's phone numbers.

What do they mean by word analysis?

Elizabeth

Come over here so I can slap you. The test is more important than hockey.

Elizabeth

One parent will be there, I'd just rather it be me!

Cheryl

Her spelling is pretty decent usually. End of year "review" test, she scored

I don't know and I CANNOT find anything useful on line.

Cheryl

We had the same teacher! I've been trying to teach DS the same stuff. Hasn't taken yet though!

Cheryl