Today was a homeschooling milestone — the first time the kids took a standardized test. It was fascinating for me and J. Just fascinating.
We’d hired a tester to administer the Peabody Individual Achievement Test. This test is given by a tester, who asks the kids questions. There’s a reading component, a math, spelling, and a general knowledge section. Each section has 100 question, gradually increasing in difficulty. The tester just keeps asking questions until you get a certain number of them wrong. That raw score is then converted into equivalent school grade.
There weren’t really any surprises for us. Not in a “wow, the kiddo did really bad” sort of way. We immediately realized that we need to focus our math curriculum to include how to solve word problems — both our kids were a bit baffled by them. Not by the arithmetic involved, but by how one tackles a word problem at all. No, what surprised us was how good the kids were in their areas of strength. K’s reading and M’s general knowledge were massively beyond their purported “grade level.”
Now, the Peabody has had some criticisms leveled at it, as regards inflated values and scores. And, that’s fine, really. I am not intending to use the results for bragging rights. (Except to my mother, who I called to inform of the manifest genius-ness, talent, grace, and attractiveness of her grandchildren, all of which she knew already.) But it’s an interesting benchmark, in a homeschooling environment in which we don’t do much testing. At all.
Both the kids sat still and concentrated just fine. Neither kid seemed really upset by skipping questions. Nether seemed to know how to game exams — how to eliminate the least likely answers and make a guess with better odds. Both kids liked the tester and said they enjoyed the experience. K was a reading master, tackling sentences and words more complex than we tend to give her. M was a fact-spewing machine in general knowledge, and generated complex answers to bizarrely random questions.
It was a good experience all around. We’re going to use the same woman and same test next year, which is the first year we have to report anything to the state. And, in the meantime, we’re going to teach the kids how to solve word problems.
Oh, and we’ll add in a little bit about sports. The sports-general-knowledge questions stumped both the kiddos.
Filed under: Autobiography, Parenting | Tagged: homeschool, peabody
It does sound fascinating. Now I want to ask all sorts of picky detailed questions about how the process works.
We have both kids in school half days this year for babysitting reasons (I’m due with our third any day now), but for the oldest (5 yo) we are also using an online gifted math program out of Stanford, epgy.stanford.edu My husband’s trained as a mathematician but wanted to outsource the lower levels. They also have a language arts for the lower grades and various AP etc upper level courses. We’re very pleased with it so far.
Our state requires standard testing for all kids in public schools including distance ed programs like the one we use starting third grade. My problem comes in that we are doing third grade this year even though by state records he’s second. I don’t know if I should test this spring or wait until next year.
MN requires that, at age 7, you get testing — but it doesn’t require that you turn those results in . . .