Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion standardised testing - we survived!!

Down Under we subject every child to standardised testing in reading, numeracy, language conventions and writing in years 3,5,7 and 9. My girls did the testing for the first time this year. Here's what I learned:

* testing is tiring because it is a break in normal, everyday routine. Expect dramas and meltdowns afterschool.
* in reading comprehension (when you read a passage of text and then answer a series of multiple choice questions afterwards)... some kids think it's cheating if you look back at the text when you're answering the questions...
* your writing is as good as the question you get on the day. There may be no correlation between what you produce in a test and your actual writing skill.
* even rational, sane parents who understand the strengths and limitations of standardised testing - who acknowledge and understand all the reasons why their gifted child might bomb - still get really, really anxious about standardised testing. Stock up on chocolate

Hoorah! It's over for another 2 years!!!

jojo

Whew! that stuff is always very difficult, and around here we wait months to ever see how kids do...hope they did ok and did not stress too bad. We are about to go into standard tests pretty soon here. My son is forever coming up with things like 'gotta do all the math work in my head', similar to the idea of looking at a reading passage twice being 'cheating'...yikes! these guys can be so hard on themselves.

We are also in Australia, but my DS is in Year 4 this year.

It is a long wait for the results, but for us, it was very mixed. My gifted child scored under the state average for maths, but is working 2-3 years ahead at school. Not sure what happened there, but it doesn't look great. It was very interesting to see what his results actually were for English. the school consider that his weak subject and he floored them with his results. It actually was beneficial for us.

Good luck

Yep, I think we too will get very mixed results and unlikely to reflect ability in the least! Sounds like DD9's highest score was in language conventions - ha! - not usually a strength. And I have no idea how DD6 went. Thankfully it's OVER for another 2 years...

jojo