Darlington, MD: Harford Friends School seventh grade students made impressive gains in critical thinking and achievement tests since they were first assessed as sixth graders.
At the end of its first year of operation, one-third of the school’s sixth grade qualified to apply for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY) summer programs. To qualify, a student must score in the 95th percentile or better in the reasoning sections of a national standardized test. After two years in the school’s academically challenging program and a second year of assessment, two-thirds of the original sixth grade (now seventh grade) class qualified for the CTY talent search.
The school uses the stringent ERB (Educational Records Bureau) CTP4 tests to assess its curriculum and track student growth. The tests compare Harford Friends School students to national, suburban public school, and independent school norms. “While we do not rely on standardized testing to assess our program or students, we use the ERB tests as a pulse check to see how our program compares to the most rigorous private schools in the country, generally the top twenty percent of the national standard,” commented Jonathan Huxtable, Harford Friends’ Head of School.
The school’s scores matched or exceeded those of independent schools. The most significant gains occurred in the critical thinking tests, verbal and quantitative reasoning, in which Harford Friends School students improved their mean scores by 2.2% and 6.6%, respectively. “What is remarkable about those scores,” noted Huxtable, “is that the average increase for each second-year student was 15 percentiles in verbal reasoning and 21 percentiles in quantitative reasoning. Quite frankly, the gains are more significant than we had anticipated.”
“Testing is not and will not be our focus at HFS, though it is nice to have our approach to teaching critical thinking skills validated by an independent assessment,” Huxtable continued. “My favorite story form our testing week was one student’s comment. She said, ‘Why didn’t we spend a few weeks preparing for testing like we did at my old school?’ Since we treat testing as a pulse check to evaluate the performance of our program primarily and secondarily our students, I feel we spend all but one week of the year learning.”
