Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

Tomorrow starts IOWA Test of Basic Skills, ITBS, for MilitaryKid, and runs every morning for three days. Several years ago a couple hs friends learned that I administered the IOWA to my kids every spring and asked to join in. We tested in my home and while it was tight the kids used the ‘please stay in your seats and be quiet while the others finish’ time to leave their seats and go elsewhere in my home to play. It was distracting to say the least. The following year another family joined in, and one friend found a church schoolroom for us to use. The room and the church worked great but the hour drive to the church, which meant getting the kids up that much earlier, really made for a very tiring week. Whew, I was so glad when last year another hs’ing friend found a local church with a huge assemble hall for us to use. Our little testing circle grew to 40 HS children in grades 3 – 8, and that’s where we’ll be this week.

We began hs’ing in Massachusetts, ‘99, and as such needed to follow MA rules. Massachusetts at the time—I don’t know if it has changed but I doubt it—did not have homeschool laws but court case doctrine that dictated the rules we followed. One rule was that yearly we either had to develop a portfolio or provide standardized test results to our local school superintendent for his review. Standardized test results seemed to me to be the easier route to go, and since the local school used the IOWA as their standardized test in 3rd grade, I went with that. I figured the local school superintendent would accept test results from a standardized test that his own school used.

That first year ScienceKid was in 3rd grade and he tested great; actually he was at the 99 percentile on just about everything and rarely answered a question incorrectly. A 99% on a standardized test can be thought of as the child doing better than 99 of the 100 children that took the test. The IOWA result page provides detailed information for every sub-test, even breaking down into further detail each sub-test. For instance within the language arts section, one sub-test is punctuation. This sub-test is then broken down into various types of punctuation. The detail information is one thing about the IOWA that I find helpful to my interpretation which includes; how many questions were asked in each area, how many the child attempted, how many he answered correctly, how many the ‘NORM’ answers correctly, the percentile relative to the norm for the child, and then the grade equivalent. Going into that first test back in 2000 I was sure ScienceKid would test awful in punctuation since I knew he did not know how to punctuate. Well, I was partially wrong. While he did answer incorrectly in that section often, he knew much more than most 3rd graders. As a new homeschooler seeing the test results gave me reassurance that my child was doing quite fine and helped me to readjust my expectations.

Once we left MA and moved to DE the incentive to yearly test using a standardized test was eliminated. DE homeschool laws do not require a portfolio review or administration of a standardized test, but I still stuck with doing a yearly test. The reasons are numerous so I’ll share a few with you.

If for some reason I was unable to take schooling through graduation as planned, the standardized test scores are there to show to school officials that my child has a track-record of reaching benchmarks for his grade level and be able to enter school at an appropriate level. The process of test taking is a good life skill, in the sense that life does not happen at a pace that we always want. With homeschooling we get to pace ourselves, which is great, but can also cause an attitude that life revolves around us, so having to emotionally test ourselves, by stepping out of the box, is a something this test provides for us.

Familiarity with taking a standardized test is part of my real-world viewpoint. Since our sons will be taking entrance exams for college; PSAT, SAT, ACT, being familiar with how to take a standardized test is a skill I’d rather they learn now, when the stakes are not high or even existing, then later. During our Elementary Science Olympics I heard a frantic father ask his wife if their 5th grade son knew how to fill in the little bubbles for the test the child was taking. She wasn’t sure but thought that he would be able to figure-it-out. They are opposed to standardized testing, and while I respect their decision I do not see the harm in helping the child learn such a silly-little-skill while they are in our care. Last year after one test MilitaryKid came over to me and informed me that during the spelling test portion he thought he was done, so he put the book away. He had just discovered that he didn’t answer all the questions and could he go back now? I didn’t allow him to do this and while he felt awful that he hadn’t completed the section and done his best, he was that much more careful in future test sections. A little lesson learned when he is in my care then in an institutions oversight.

The focus I ask of the kids is only that; to do their best. To realize that there will be questions that are easy and others that they will not know the answer to. I see the IOWA as a tool for parents to use to find any learning problems or weak areas. I don’t teach with the TEST as a goal or even in mind, but the test can give parents a valuable tool with which to aid their children to get the most out of their learning when they are in a non-threatening atmosphere. It’s better to make needed corrections when they are young and in the safety of their parents care, than when they are out on their own and it’s REAL LIFE. The memory of a 5th grade child asking me what he was supposed to do when the math question was; 15/3= drives me to offer the IOWA to my hs friends. His mom did not realize that this child had not learned this symbol; nor that this was a 5th grade skill. Yes, sometimes we need to step outside our box. Another year when the test results came back one mom was thrilled with how her dd’s grammar score had improved from the previous year. She was sure that her new grammar program and the extra little focus in this area had helped her dd.

So, tomorrow almost 40 homeschool children will start their IOWA testing with me. I won’t wish them luck, just that they do their best.