Which brings me back again to my discomfort with test prep for reasoning tests. How do we find those kids if they have peers who are able to prep for these tests when they are not able to do the same? Am I just not showing enough confidence in the quality of the tool? Does prep not make a significant enough impact to worry about?
I think test prep probably does have a sizable impact, just as any sort of learning that increases ability is going to have an impact. How much? I have no idea. But I understand your worries and share them. It's obvious others here do too. When you have young children especially, the enrichment they've received will make some of them seem highly advanced compared to age peers (or perhaps they will be highly advanced, but not in a way that correlates fully to intelligence levels they will reach later). Hence similar concerns over parents hothousing their children. Learning works!
The thing is, I don't think you can easily draw a bright line with some of these issues. How much, exactly, would taught material have to resemble the specific format and/or content of items on a particular test, to even constitute specific test prep?
And how much teaching/enrichment/stimulation is unfair hothousing? People comment in negative, sometimes offhand ways about hothousing; for example we've heard people here relate how some jealous parents comment that their children haven't been "given the same opportunities". The comments are often offered as commentary that a hothousing parent is essentially abusing their child, but what's really at the heart of the label? Jealousy and angst that someone else's children have or will have advantages over the speaker's own, and a violated sense of fairness based on the speaker's own choices.
And is it really desirable that kids not be taught, just to try to get a more valid benchmark on a test, especially knowing that some parents would always cheat the system? Or should the solution be to try to improve the imperfect assessment tools, rely on more than test numbers from a single test for identification, etc.?
Testing is inherently imperfect, and you can't control what a parent will do in her own home. It would be more workable and fair in my opinion to expose all children to some standardized test prep before a test, rather than try to enforce a lack of prep.
They will not excel on tests like MAP because they have never seen some of the content--their unremarkable classroom performance doesn't suggest a need to accelerate them to what they could do in the right circumstances.
This is one of the reasons I'm uncomfortable with heavy reliance on achievement for identification of giftedness. Some reliance is okay, as it's some evidence, but underprivileged and other under-the-radar, unidentified children will always tend to be at a disadvantage.
