Like many parents, I am ambivalent about standardized testing. On the one hand, I am not sure tests can tell us what we need to know about the quality of an educational environment. I wonder if test scores say more about students’ test-taking ability than their knowledge or capacity to learn. I worry about “teaching to the test” because I want classroom time to be more integrated and nuanced than what you can get from multiple choice. On the other hand, I absolutely looked up the district’s standardized testing scores when my family considered moving here, and I used these scores to compare Harvard’s schools to other towns. I felt good knowing my kid was going to go to a “good school” if we lived here, and state test scores were a huge part of how I measured that.
This year, I have a third-grader, which means this was the first year we experienced MCAS, the state-wide Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests in English Language Arts and Math. Offered in March and May, MCAS tries to measure how well kids have mastered core subjects at their various grade levels. The assessments are given at Hildreth Elementary School in third, fourth, and fifth grades.
This year was going to be the beginning of my child’s exposure to high-stakes testing, an experience that would contribute to everything from his sense of himself as a student to his eventual ability to get into the college of his choice. So in early March, when my son’s teacher sent home her first note about getting ready for the MCAS, I was eager to learn what that meant in a district like Harvard.
Like every parent, I want my child to have the tools and skills he needs to be successful. For many kids, test taking doesn’t come naturally. Sitting quietly, keeping his mind and body focused and on task, sometimes in a timed environment—these are skills I’ve rarely seen my child display. Standardized tests that measure a child’s cumulative knowledge can also be stressful, which can affect performance. But test taking is a skill that can be learned and honed, and it was this skill-set that I was most pleased to see his teacher working to build with her students.
Yes, third-graders still prepare for testing in many traditional ways. I reached out to Hildreth third-grade teachers Chris Burns and Amy Bassage to talk about MCAS, and in their joint email response they described how they offered students opportunities to get familiar with the standard directions and vocabulary used on the test so they’d be comfortable with what they were supposed to do on test day. Students regularly completed practice exercises using problems from past exams and practiced answering different styles of questions so there would be no surprises. To help the kids keep their testing in perspective, the teachers made sure the students knew the MCAS was just one “snapshot” of their skills on a given day.
But, said Burns and Bassage, effective test preparation isn’t just about reviewing the core material and learning to follow the directions. The kids also practiced test-taking strategies such as crossing out answers that were clearly incorrect on multiple-choice questions, underlining key words to help understand long questions, and making graphic organizers to help them plan their open-response answers. On the days leading up to the test, students read stories like “Testing Miss Malarkey,” which Burns and Bassage said can help students “loosen up.” Some classes practiced “therapy time,” where students were given a chance to color or do some other relaxing activity at their seats. They listened to music that taught them about handling stress and practiced relaxation techniques like visualization, breathing, and self-massage. Students from other grades were invited into the third-graders’ test preparation as well. “Buddy classes in the younger grades make encouraging posters, cards, and mementos for the third-graders, like decorated rocks for ‘rocking the test’ or water bottles with inspirational sayings on the labels,” the teachers said.
On the morning of the MCAS test, the entire third grade went for a brisk walk to Bare Hill Pond, to give the kids a chance to “wake up, loosen up, breathe in fresh air, and relax their nerves,” said Bassage and Burns in their email. When they arrived back in the classroom, the students did a “brain gym video” prepared by their fifth-grade peer leaders. “Students follow their peer leaders making arm, finger, eye, and leg movements that have been researched to improve concentration, focus, memory, organization, and attitude. The video also reminds students of small movements they can do right at their seats during test taking if they are having a difficult time concentrating or retrieving information,” they said.
Strategies for success
I sat down with Assistant Principal Josh Myler, who said that helping teach the third-graders strategies for successful test taking would pay them dividends both now and down the road. “We don’t want confusion or anxiety about the test to detract from what they know how to do, to make it harder for them to show they understand the concept. It’s a skill they’ll need in high school and getting ready for college. Knowing how to show what you know is important,” he said.
But, Myler said, the self-regulation and self-awareness skills used in test preparation are not only offered for MCAS. “Movement breaks and being aware of your body and how you are feeling and how that is affecting your ability to think are something they work on all throughout the year,” he said. “The occupational therapy and physical education teachers have researched types of helpful movement. For example, crossing your midline—” and here he demonstrated, reaching his hand from one side of his body to the other—“helps engage both sides of your brain and is helpful developmentally for students. We are intentional about using movements designed to prepare them for what’s ahead.”
Movement breaks are not the only thing taught throughout the year. Core content is integrated into the curriculum so students learn all the important material without having to stop mid-year to shift to full-time test prep. For Myler, the resulting test scores are one component of a much larger mosaic that illustrates student performance. “MCAS is just one of the ways we show what we know about reading, about math concepts. I like that we are a small district that can look at individual students, at test scores but also at relationships and homework and classroom performance, and use all of those individual pieces of information to meet that child’s needs,” he said.
Hildreth’s holistic approach
As a parent new to MCAS, I have appreciated the holistic approach the teachers and administration at Hildreth have taken to help prepare my child to not only demonstrate what he knows on the test this year, but to build a toolbox of test-taking strategies that will serve him in years to come. I don’t think that tests can tell us everything we need to know about individual achievement or how well a school is doing to educate its students, but I do think the approach a school takes towards testing tells us an awful lot about the quality of the environment in which our kids learn. In that capacity, I’m pleased to report that our third graders are learning in classrooms that value emotional and physical preparation as highly as material knowledge. They are learning from teachers who are compassionate and caring, who strive to teach their students not only what they need to know, but also why it matters. They are learning about the relaxing effects of a well-timed walk to the pond. And that is just as valuable as what can be measured by any test.
