Posts Tagged ‘usa test prep’

Test Prep And School Performance

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Thinking about Test Prep Review: A recent WNYC news piece “What Tougher State Exams Mean for Test Prep in Brownsville” caught my attention. Most thought-provoking was the comment of Dr. Stephen Appea, principal at the Brownsville school featured in the article:

“In many places educators were not doing the jobs and not doing right by the kids and so that’s why No Child Left Behind – the motivation, the intent of it  – may have been good,” he said. “But what happened was what we see now, which is a nation of test prep schools.”

Schools shouldn’t need to focus on test prep. The growing lament of teachers, it seems, is that they should be left to teach.

So what is the answer? Well, perhaps part of the answer would be to refocus on the reasons that some children are scoring poorly, indicating that they’re not learning well.  Schools with few options for increasing resources for their struggling students have begun to find that affordable brain training software can be a way to boost academic performance and raise test scores. I for one would like to think that our efforts could be part of the answer.