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Children at the Center: A Workshop Approach to Standardized Test Preparation, K-8

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This book grew out of ten one hour workshops for upper-elementary school kids that the authors developed working with classroom teachers. The seventy-nine fifth graders who did the first version of these raised their median performance on the total battery of the district's annual normed multiple choice achievement test from a normal curve equivalent of 41 to a normal curve equivalent of 65.7. (Detailed step by step accounts of what the teachers and kids did and why are the heart of the book, and the materials they used are in an appendix.) The workshops focus on collaborative activities that help students learn how to show more of what they actually know on tests like these, paying some attention to helping them manage their feelings as well as attention to helping them understand how the questions work and ways to go about answering them successfully. Other chapters discuss issues teachers face in explaining norm-referenced results to parents and what teachers can and can't ethically do about helping kids improve their test taking. (One gives a clear comprehensible review of some relatively sophisticated and practically important issues about how norm-referenced tests are constructed and what the results can and can't actually be used for, too.) This is a smart, principled and practical book that will be especially useful to teachers who'd like to use collaborative, inquiry based learning to help their students do better on multiple choice, standardized assessments.