A New Standardized Exam for GSA
This spring we will be introducing our students to the CTP-4 series of exams, which will replace the Stanford-10 that has been in use at the GSA for several years. The CTP-4 is just one exam offered by the Educational Research Bureau (ERB). ERB tests are unique in that they are created by and for private school teachers. In addition to the usual multiple-choice questions, the CTP-4 includes open-ended options called "constructed response" questions. The GSA faculty has opted to use the most comprehensive of the CTP-4 exams, which will include both the multiple-choice questions and the constructed response questions. These exams will be given in grades 1-8, and the results will be used by the teachers to guide curricular decisions and also to monitor the progress of individual students. We anticipate that the feedback from the CTP-4 will be more useful than the feedback from the Stanford-10. Our students tended to do very well on the language arts and math portions of the Stanford-10 (the only two areas tested by the ERB), and so it was not a very useful tool for us.
You might wonder why we offer standardized testing at all—we are certainly not a "test-driven" school in general. Independent schools have considerable control over their curriculum and, while the GSA teachers do make use of national standards such those distributed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and make use of programs such as Everyday Math, it is important to ensure that we are "on track." The ERB is also the same organization that produces the ISEE (Independent School Entrance Exam) which is required by many competitive private high schools, so an additional advantage to using the CTP-4 is that it is similar to the screening exam used by private schools.
A representative from ERB will come to campus in August during the faculty workdays to explain how to read a score report; we will hold a similar session for parents in September. Be aware that since we will now be comparing ourselves to a cohort group of private school students, we can expect our scores to drop—this is normal.
Our status as an accredited school (which we achieved just last spring) and membership in a national independent school association, such as the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) makes us eligible to join the ERB. We are pleased to be able to offer this rigorous testing program to our students.