Click on Shop Hoagies' Page before you visit your favorite on-line stores including Amazon and many more of your favorite stores.  Thanks for making Hoagies' Gifted community possible!

Donations
Your donations help keep Hoagies' Gifted Education Page on-line.

Support Hoagies' Page!

Hoagies' Blog Hop February 2015: Testing

We'll start this year's Hoagies' Gifted Blog Hop with a tough topic... Testing.  Testing means so many things in this day and age.  It means those public school achievement tests that take weeks and months away from our kids' instructional year, much to the dismay of kids, parents, teachers, administrators... just about everyone.  But with gifted kids, testing can also mean high-stakes IQ tests that do, or don't, qualify our kids for the "gifted" program or school... whether it suits our kids or not. 

To homeschooling parents, testing may bring up feelings of it being unnecessary. Homeschoolers already meet their kids instructional needs, so why test at all?  Then there are our 2e kids, to whom testing can mean the difference between diagnosis and folks understanding and supporting them, or folks calling them "lazy" or "unmotivated."  Testing is a loaded topic!

For more on testing, visit Hoagies' Testing and Assessment, and read the FAQs including How Can I Prepare My Child for Testing? by Aimee Yermish, and What Do the Tests Tell Us? and Why do my child's test scores vary from test to test? by Carolyn K.
 

Ceilings and Ceiling Tiles: A Call for Civil Disobedience by Wenda Sheard, J.D. Ph.D. Thoughts on Life and Learning

After I wrote the article (Pop the Bubbles: Thoughts on Standardized Testing), I learned from teachers and administrators that the testing burden on students and schools nationwide is worse than I described. The burden is so bad, in fact, that for the first time in my life, I am asking parents to consider a form of civil disobedience. In particular, I am calling on parents of high-ability children who attend non-poverty school districts to consider keeping their children home on standardized testing days. In this article, I give reasons for my request... (comic credit: Comic-O-Matic by Margo Burns)
 

Gifted Testing: A Beginner's Guide by Carolyn K., in Hoagies' Nibbles and Bits

Gifted Testing. What is it? Why should we do it? What are the best tests to use? What do the results mean? And most often asked... How can I prepare my child for Gifted Testing?
 

Gifted Testing In Singapore From A Parent's Perspective by Elgarmummy

I had originally decided against testing. It is not cheap, and there is nothing much one could do with the results. I found one after googling. When I had checked out MOE’s website, there was something on acceleration for exceptionally gifted children. It would require testing to recognise him. Was he in that range? While I could check off a number of criteria listed by on that page, there were other criteria that were not that strong...
 

Giftedness: To Test or Not To Test? by Catie, My Little Poppies

As a school psychologist, I am often asked my opinion on testing. Since starting this silly little blog, I receive oodles of messages about testing for giftedness. Deciding whether or not to test your child is a difficult one, and I know this firsthand because Schizz and I went back and forth about having Leo tested for many, many months. Ultimately, the decision to test or not to test is a personal decision. Today, I will share with you how we came to our decision, in the hopes that it may help others who are on similar paths. ...
 

Not Everyone Hates Tests (Just Most of Us) by Linda Wallin, Living with Geniuses

I had noticed some difficulties when she did her math homework. She could solve the math easily when I drew a picture, but she couldn’t remember how her teacher had explained it to her. It was enough for me to have her tested...
 

Tests for Tests Sake by Chocky's Child

When I was a gifted kid – both before I knew I was a gifted kid and after I knew I was a gifted kid – I loved doing tests. They were one of the few times in my schooling and the life surrounding my schooling where I actually felt that my intellectual ability (that I knew very well that I had even when I was in educational environments where it was obvious that I was supposed to try and hide it) was allowed to come out. Where I was allowed to be smart and show off what I knew...
 

How to explain IQ testing to your gifted child by Gail Post in Gifted Challenges

• Explain to your child that she is being tested to see if the teachers can understand her more. The results will help the teachers find ways to make learning more interesting. The more they know about what she does best, the easier it will be for them to sort out how to make school the best it can be for her...
 

To Test, or Not To Test -- That Is the Question by Braver than you believe

I knew they were different. I knew they would never really fit in. Why did it matter what numbers they were assigned by a test?

It mattered because I wanted to give them something to hold on to. Something that told them why they were so very different. Not something to define them, but something to inspire them, something to give them permission to be everything they are without being labeled just "odd..."
 

Keeping Score by Diane Hale, in Schooling the Gifted

It is human nature to want to quantify, compare and analyze. Tests help us do just that. The final score of the football game tells us one piece of information and paints part of the picture. As we look closer, though, and identify how many passing yards one team had over another, the picture starts to fill in more. We begin to see that there is data along the way that can help us predict the outcome. The number of injuries one team sustains during the game, even the temperature of the stadium can all factor into the equation. Testing in school is similar to this...
 

Testing? How? by Homeschooling Hatters

When you're sitting well below "middle class," testing becomes a big issue. In looking for anywhere to do the testing we'd need, we found that we were, quite neatly, excluded from any sort of testing. Not only are there no practitioners within 100 miles of us that are familiar with gifted children, the only practitioners we could find in the local-ish area were those who either seemed to purport all children having some fashion of LD (be it ADHD, ODD, or something else) or who believe that there are not such things as ADHD or childhood anxiety. Needless to say, neither of these are suitable for testing for giftedness, given the intensity of OE's we have. However, going farther afield doesn't help much either...
 

Gifted Testing… Elitist?… Limited?… Necessary? by Gift-Ed Connections

If you think of “G” as being the sum of those cognitive abilities that are highly valued and cultivated in our society, then the creation of a test that focuses on the degree to which one possesses these abilities makes sense…especially if the political will in education is to cultivate those highly valued abilities in both the “average” child and “not so average” child. So in using cognitive testing there must be a recognition that there are many abilities or gifts that may not be measured by the tests we are giving...
 

Gifted Testing Dilemma by Planet Smarty Pants

I think many of us heard this question before: My toddler started to walk at 8 months, talk at 10, knows all her letters by 18 months. Is she gifted? Where can I get her tested? My immediate reaction to these inquiries is, Why do you want to know? I believe we need to inspect our real reasons for wanting to know “the gifted status” of our children. Is there anything that you will do differently or anyone else will do differently with your children if you can officially label them as gifted? Or is “gifted” label is something that you want to have, so you can get “bragging rights"?
 

To Test or Not To Test Gifted Children by Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn

I know for us screening or testing is a matter of fact, do I like it? No, I do not after raising a child who was developmentally delayed, and was told she would never learn to ride a bike, or play an instrument, to which she proved them wrong. Yet, knowing that much of the testing and screening they put her through was accurate...

 

Updated December 01, 2020