I know. I was just wondering what was meant by testing "early and often". And does *more* testing equate with a better educated populace or is it simply - more testing?
I wonder this myself. I was shocked at the build up and school time taken on one round of standardized testing given to the 3rd graders at our previous school (we have a neighbor with a 3rd grader). This poor little girl was stressed out for a month. And she is actually quite GT.
I was quite happy with the Peabody test we did to fufill our homeschooling requirements. Someone came to our house and administered it orally. We did zero prep, it took less than an hour (in our case - it can take up to 2), and he could continue on K-12 material until he burned out on what he could answer. The Peabody is not a perfect test by any means. It could never parse out the top percentages (very small sample sizes, limited questions, etc). But it did let me know DS is between 2-7 grade levels ahead of everything as a 2nd grader after a year of extremely laid back homeschooling. I think it at least did a fairly good job assessing math, reading, and spelling.
If a low impact test like that could be given at the beginning and end of every academic year, it seems like testing information could be used to place kids academically and be able to see what they have learned over the course of an academic year. Maybe there's not a way to do something similar in a classroom of 25. But it could be a useful tool.
