Hi Parents and Students,

The students are testing for IOWA as I write this and they are all here and look to be feeling calm and confident. Good Luck 5KP.

STANDARDIZED TESTING INFORMATION FOR PARENTS

Students in grades 3 – 8 will be taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills during the week of October 20th-24th. (Friday the 24th is also United Nations Day here at school and we will be using that day as a make-up day for any students who may have missed a day during the week.)

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. There will not be a great deal of homework given out during this week.

· 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.