October 22, 2015
There is so much to love about fall: the cooler weather, beautiful colors, crisp apples and pumpkin lattes, cookies, pies, and breads. In schools, fall is also test-taking time as students across the country take standardized tests. Mounds Park Academy administers several tests in October, including the ACT Aspire—a vertically articulated, benchmarked, standards-based test—to students in grades 3–8 and the PSAT in grades 10 and 11.
There is much heated debate in today’s educational landscape regarding standardized testing. Researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Brown recently released a study that showed raised student test scores were not associated with an increase in “fluid intelligence”—a term used to refer to our ability to use logical thinking and problem solving in novel situations rather than recalling previously learned facts and skills. Others, such as educational researcher Alfie Kohn, continued to express concern about an overemphasis on standardized testing in this country, believing that this trend is robbing children of a well-balanced education. And still others, as highlighted by the Time Magazine article “Why It’s Time to Get Rid of Standardized Tests,” are worried about bias in standardized testing.
At MPA, we firmly believe that standardized testing alone does not truly identify a child. Our students come to life as individuals in their daily interactions with their classmates, teachers, and curriculum. Because of that, we don’t teach to any test and we keep standardized testing time to a minimum. Instead, we fill our days with education that challenges, engages, and inspires.
MPA’s philosophy of student learning is based on research from pioneering education experts including Howard Gardner and Benjamin Bloom, as well as acclaimed modern researchers such as Carol Dweck. Our curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments are tied to best practices, representing a wide range of experiential learning that involves and reaches students of various learning styles and skills.
We know that knowledge and comprehension are necessary for learning and that it is also essential that students expand their higher-level thinking through application, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. These 21st-century, higher-level thinking skills are built into our curriculum, with students consistently assessed in both formal and informal ways.
MPA’s small class sizes and individual attention make it possible for teachers to know each student well and provide individual attention; we understand that every learner possesses gifts and strengths as well as areas ripe for development. Projects, writing, discussion, solving complex equations, and drawing are only a few of the many types of assessments that happen year round, enabling teachers to closely monitor each child’s strengths and challenges.
While a single test should not be used to determine high-stake decisions or to evaluate a single child in isolation, standardized testing, when done sparingly and with little disruption to class time, can actually present information that can help understand overall patterns and trends in a large group of learners. MPA uses standardized test results in three ways:
• To better inform curriculum design
• To identify discrepancies
• To better prepare students for the testing component that the college process inevitably entails
While we are proud of the success of every student in all areas, we are also proud of their success on the ACT. Mounds Park Academy students consistently perform at or above the median ACT score of our independent school peers in our national benchmarking group and far above state and national averages.
Furthermore, results from the ACT Aspire tests show that our middle school students consistently rank in the top percentile nationally and demonstrate college and career readiness across the board in English, science, reading, math and writing. In particular, middle school students scored highest in English and science.
At MPA, we know that the best education occurs when critical thinking and deep content knowledge are used as the base for growing flexible and essential skills in collaboration, problem solving, perseverance, and creativity. Above all, however, we know that the best education occurs when students establish close personal relationships with one another and their teachers.
