Most school children don’t like taking standardized tests. They are often long and boring. Please assure your children that our free, no-risk, math assessment is nothing like other tests they may have taken.
Parcc
Colorado school children used to take a standardized test called Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or the PARCC assessment. PARCC is a consortium of states using the testing and publishing company, Pearson, to measure student achievement. In 2017, the Colorado State Board of Education withdrew from the PARCC consortium because the test took too long to administer and the schools didn’t get results in a timeframe that made the feedback helpful.
CMAS
Most grade levels will still take the Colorado Measures of Academic Success or CMAS test. The CMAS is the Colorado version of the PARCC assessment. Results from the CMAS often leave parents more confused than they were before they got the results. We hope the revised CMAS lives up to expectations of less testing time and quicker results. Unfortunately, it probably still won’t tell you as a parent the particular math skills your child has, or hasn’t, mastered. It describes their results in more general terms like “approaching grade level in algebraic concepts.” The CMAS is designed for measuring schools. It doesn’t help much with creating individual learning paths for children.
What about MAP Testing?
Children in many districts also take the Measures of Academic Progress, or “MAP” from the Northwest Evaluation Association. The MAP test is better than CMAS for helping teachers know how to instruct your child in math. The test is relatively short and results are immediately available. But the results you get are still just a snapshot of your child’s math skills. Growth over the course of the year on the MAP test does indicate your child is improving.
How is the Mathnasium Assessment Different?
Most students find our assessment to be a much more positive experience than other standardized tests. We know many children coming into the center to take the assessment either have test anxiety, math frustrations or both so we do our best to reduce those as much as possible. We start with a tour of the center followed by 15-20 minutes of time just getting to know your child. We find out about their pets and their sports teams and what they do for fun. We share snippets from our lives with them and make the overall interaction positive and lighthearted. This is followed by 20-30 minutes of oral questions and answers. This gives us an insight into foundational areas of weakness as well as how your child processes. We discover if they are best suited to verbal instruction, visual instruction, both or neither. We observe if they are counting on their fingers (or in their heads, or anywhere else by ones). We can observe number sense that hasn't been nurtured or that isn't in place at all! And we have opportunities to teach a child a simple way of looking at a problem that will give them a ray of hope and an actual tip whether they end up being a student of ours or not. All of this takes place before they ever sit down with pencil and paper to take a "test.". At the end, kids are rewarded for their time and effort with an opportunity to buy a reward from our rewards cabinet. And parents will learn so much more from our results because we have gone so much deeper than a standardized, classroom test.
Our complimentary, no-risk assessment is designed for two things. 1) Catch any underlying math gaps. Math gaps in prerequisite skills are especially dangerous. 2) Discover what your child is ready to learn next. Once the assessment has taken place, we analyze the results and create a learning path specific to your child’s needs and pace.
Find out more! Give us a call today! 303-840-1184.
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