Hi Parents and Students
I just copied the following from the Elementary Principal’s blog.

Dear Parents,

Students in grades 3 – 8 will Iowa Test of Basic Skills during the week of October 26th.

Shanghai American School provides many different sources of assessment throughout the year. One source of information is our program of standardized achievement testing. The test series we use, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a norm-referenced test. This means that a student’s scores indicate how he/she compares with a representative sample of peers (the norm group). This gives us an idea of how our students’ academic achievement compares to students at public and private schools from the United States and other international schools.

The following is a list of subject areas students are evaluated in:

* Vocabulary
* Reading Comprehension
* Language: Spelling, Capitalization, Punctuation, Usage and Expression
* Mathematics: Math Concepts and Estimation, Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation, Math Computation

Reading comprehension includes: understanding factual information; drawing conclusions; inferring feelings of characters; and determining topic, viewpoint, attitude, structure, and style.
Math Concepts and Estimation includes: numeration and operations; measurement; fractions, decimals, and percents; and equations and inequalities.
Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation includes: single step addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems; multiple step problem solving strategies; reading amounts; comparing quantities; and interpreting relationships.

Important Suggestions and Reminders:

* Students should get a good night’s sleep and eat breakfast before coming to school.
* It is important to remember that any individual’s test score is only a measure of how well he/she performed on a single assessment on a given day. The score may be different another day due to testing conditions and the physical and/or emotional state of the individual student.
* The IOWA is only one source of data the School uses to measure student achievement.

If you have any further questions, please contact your classroom teacher or the elementary administration.