All Articles tagged Testing

Building A Strong College Application

February 26, 2022 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

When it comes to building a strong college application, shifting policies have upended the college admissions process causing confusion and anxiety for many of our students and families. These changes also resulted in a swell of applications, making the competition for spots even more significant. During the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, many elite universities made SAT and ACT scores optional, and many but not all continued this policy for the 2022-2023 school year—while the University of California system remains intent on phasing them out entirely. Moreover, in January 2021, the College Board announced that it will no longer offer SAT subject tests or the optional SAT Essay. However, it’s unclear what testing policies will be in place for the 2023-2024 school year.

For high achieving students who attend a rigorous high school and plan to submit stellar test scores to differentiate themselves from the pack, they should stay the course and exceed admissions requirements. Submitting strong test scores remains strategically advantageous. But having the option allows students to think more creatively about their application package, and there are other ways to build or enhance a strong college application with or without standardized test scores.

First, lean into your AP exams. In its announcement of the policy change, the College Board indicated that the increasing popularity of AP exams has made their own subject tests extraneous. While APs have always been used as an indication of students’ ability to excel in demanding, college-level classes, going forward, high scores will be even more important in helping applicants show their strengths.

Aside from studying for your APs, use the time you would have spent preparing for other standardized tests to work on a self-directed project. Nobody enjoys spending their Saturday afternoons on timed practice tests or staying up late to drill flashcards. If you have an idea of what you’d rather be working on—whether it’s developing an app or directing a short film—put your energy into that. Being able to design and execute a complex project is a much better indication of whether a student will succeed in the open environment of a university than their ability to take a standardized test. More importantly, your choice of project tells the admissions committee who you are, which makes for a strong college application.

Independent projects will give admissions officers greater insight into your character, especially if you have an artistic inclination. Spend your senior year honing your talent by doing enrichment activities. Many of the extracurriculars students would normally participate in have not been possible, but you can always play the piano or sketch the view outside your window. Applications with fine art portfolios, concert footage, and short films—even to schools where the arts are not the focus—round out your application and distinguish you from other students. Creative projects also more directly reflect your personality, and they make for great material when it comes time to write your Common App essay and supplements.

If you’re not the artistic type, consider opportunities in science, math, engineering, or business. These can be more structured, like participating in online summer courses offered through universities, like Columbia’s SHAPE program, or more open-ended, like creating and managing an investment portfolio. Even without access to a laboratory, young scientists can collaborate with other students from not just their school, but around the world to develop and implement advanced research projects. Johns Hopkins has put together a very thorough list of high school science competitions that can help build a strong college application (especially if you win!)

Lastly, if you want to build a strong college application, consider volunteering. Many high school students are required to complete some kind of volunteer work in order to graduate. However, the reality is that these activities are often rushed, and admissions officers can spot the difference between box-ticking and genuine commitment. The point of volunteer work is to serve a community you’re a member of or help a cause you care about. Long-term work at local animal shelters and food pantries, or with national groups, like Habitat for Humanity, tell admissions officers not just how you like to spend your free time—but how you aim to make the world a better place. During the era of COVID, there are even more opportunities for young people to help and to gain experience in the medical professions.

For students who have always been excellent test-takers, all of these announcements may come as a shock, but for others, the new admissions policies will be a welcome change. Your grades and AP exam scores will take on greater importance, but you will also have more freedom in how you want to individualize and build a strong college application. Instead of focusing on extra tests, use this time to think about what you really want to do—in college and beyond—and then try doing it!

Written by Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed. and Board Certified Educational Planner, and Faya Hoffman, M.S. and Board Certified Educational Planner.

Why Consider Boarding Schools?

October 5, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Boarding schools are an incredible option that not enough families are familiar with. Having grown up in the midwest, neither Faya nor I grew up in a boarding school culture. If referencing boarding programs, more often than not we would hear something like, “Oh, he was sent away to boarding,” implying that the student was a behavior problem. But moving to New York City greatly changed our perspective, and we’ve spent the last 10+ years immersing ourselves in boarding school programs across the United States as well as internationally. We’ve visited dozens of boarding schools to learn more, first hand, from students, faculty, school leadership, parents, and other educational professionals. Our school visits have ranged from the most competitive schools in the country to the premier specialized schools for students with learning disabilities to phenomenally successful therapeutic boarding schools and residential treatment centers providing a continuum of support. Now that I know what I know, I’m positive I would have benefitted from a boarding program! So what advantages do boarding schools offer?

Whether mainstream or specialized, boarding schools (and junior boarding schools) offer a completely integrated academic, athletic, artistic, and social experience designed specifically to meet the needs of adolescents and teenagers. Parents in New York City know all too well the challenges of schlepping students to/from school, to/from Roosevelt Island for athletics, to/from the dance studio or music classes, and to/from various appointments on one end of the city or the other. Our ambitious students regularly experience the serious time drain of managing all the logistics and transitions. At boarding schools, this time loss is better avoided. Everything happens on campus, or transportation is organized to compete against a nearby school. Many boarding schools have half-day Wednesdays to facilitate afternoon sports, which is offset by Saturday morning classes, followed by sports practices and competitions. Clubs and other extracurriculars are more easily managed after the school day and weekends. Study hall, advisory, and learning support with faculty is similarly managed within set hours. Homework conflict doesn’t really exist because all students have scheduled study hours. Technology use and access to wifi is also carefully managed so that all students in a particular grade level have the same parameters imposed, thus mitigating more serious issues with screen time, gaming, and video distractions. In this way, all students benefit from a structured, systematic approach that’s predictable, consistent, and supportive.

While prospective families worry about sustained time away from their children, our current and past families generally report enhanced relationships because of the boarding school calendar and structure. School breaks tend to be longer and usually come without intense homework expectations. Therefore, students are more present and available to engage in positive, constructive relationship building at home. Parents also have regular access to school faculty, learning management systems, campus events, and visitation. Moreover, our boarding school students benefit from incredible mentorship and guidance from advisors, dorm parents, classroom teachers, coaches, college counselors, and the school faculty at large. With this interlocking network of adult supports in place and collaboratively managing some of the most fraught work of raising a teenager, our boarding school parents experience less stress with their adolescents and teenagers.

When we visit boarding school campuses, we are very impressed by the overall level of engagement and genuine happiness among students and faculty. The facilities are usually pretty incredible, and students have much more time to dive deep with their coursework and independent study. There’s time for academic exploration, research, and trying new activities all while managing rigorous academics and an incredibly satisfying social experience. Specialized programs offer the pedagogical expertise, and/or clinical expertise, necessary to help each student succeed despite learning and/or emotional challenges, and again this support is fully integrated across campus.

For parents who are sure this option is NOT for their family, we strongly encourage them to visit at least one boarding school program as part of their school research, just for comparative purposes. There are so many ways to organize schooling, and boarding schools deserve serious consideration, especially in the New York City area where we’re limited by space, both in terms of facilities and the number of classroom seats. Adding boarding schools to the list creates many more great options. Faya and I are happy to help with this exploration as part of our admissions consulting support.

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay?

September 16, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Among the genres of writing projects that students experience in upper elementary, middle and high school, the five-paragraph essay is one of the most popular. Well, it’s popular with teachers. With students, just saying the phrase “five-paragraph essay” can evoke audible groans. For those writers, it calls to mind themes of dullness and standardization, a static formula. Yet the form is a valid one for a number of reasons, and in the right conditions, it can encourage creative thinking instead of stifling it. In fact, among the benefits of the five-paragraph essay are valuable opportunities for writers in terms of cognition, rhetoric, and culture.

There’s a reason that Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchy of thinking processes, lists “creation” as its most complex category: whether a student is investigating a hypothesis, building a contraption, or writing an essay, creating something new is a difficult task. A major component of this difficulty is what educators and psychologists call cognitive load, the amount of working memory resources a task demands of the person performing it. In her widely cited article “A Capacity Theory of Writing: Working Memory in Composition,” the educational scholar Deborah McCutchen illustrates the cognitive load of writing: “to compose a text, skilled writers coordinate within working memory planning goals (e.g., plans for content, audience, overall tone, etc.) and product goals (e.g. requirements of grammaticality, plan fulfillment, etc.) while language generation processes retrieve words to express content and organize those words into appropriate text (see Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981, 1984 McCutchen, 1994).” Understandably, it can be difficult for a writer to attend to all of these processes at once, and if the cognitive load is too high, the writer might not be able to complete the task. One way to lighten this load is to focus on different aspects of the writing process and product at different times; educators have adopted this principle in frameworks like the 6+1 Writing Traits or Judith Hochman’s Teaching Basic Writing Skills. Because it offers a consistent structure, one of the major benefits of the five-paragraph essay is that once a writer is familiar with it, using that framework for planning frees more of their cognitive load. With their basic organizational scheme already chosen, the writer can attend more fully to other aspects of their work, such as ideas, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation.

In thinking of the rhetorical power of the five-paragraph essay form, rather than the total number of paragraphs, we should consider a different number, a bit of a magical number: three. In his book Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark discusses the hidden power of numbers in language. Citing examples such as “Moe, Larry, and Curly. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. A priest, a minister, and a rabbi. Executive, legislative, judicial,” he notes that “In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole.” There’s just something about a set of three things that resounds with people. In allowing the writer to use three body paragraphs to set forth three main points, the five-paragraph essay invites the writer to tap into this power. It is worth noting that three is not the only powerful number. For instance, before they learn the five-paragraph essay form, many students learn the four-paragraph essay, which reemerges occasionally in high school. This form allows students to graduate from three-paragraph essays, whose single body paragraph generally explores one major point, to use two body paragraphs to explore a duality within their topic.

The cultural argument for the five-paragraph essay may, at first, seem self-serving: It is useful because it is widely used. But just as it serves a purpose for writers, it serves a purpose for readers. Faced with this familiar form, readers know to look for a guiding claim or thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. Anticipating how the structure works makes it easier for the reader to comprehend the piece. This is not to say that all five-paragraph essays work the exact same way. As we noted above, the advantage of a familiar structure is to let students concentrate on other aspects of writing, so as students progress, their ideas should grow more sophisticated even within this same form. Their order of body paragraphs should have a perceptible logic, their analyses should be complex, and rather than serving as a simple summary, their conclusion could emphasize the significance of their argument. Even after writers move on to longer and more complex forms, they may still find occasion to access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay. Two of the highest-stakes pieces in high school, the ACT or SAT essay and the main Common Application statement, lend themselves well to the form. In both the ACT and SAT, testers must compose a complete essay in less than an hour. If they enter the test already tentatively knowing what their structure will be, they will save valuable minutes of writing time. The urgency of time is also a factor for the essays’ audiences. Both the test essays and the Common Application essay are read by people who are consuming a high volume of pieces and consuming them quickly — in the case of the application essay, in just a few minutes. It is to the writer’s advantage to make the reader’s job easier by giving them a vivid, specific essay in a structure that is easy to follow.

The students who rail against five-paragraph essays might be surprised to hear that the form is controversial in academia as well; in fact, a new book by the college instructor John Warner, titled Why They Can’t Write, is subtitled Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. While we don’t want to kill the five-paragraph essay, we agree that the form has at least one downside: the potential for overuse. If every piece a student composes is a five-paragraph essay, that’s a problem. No single structure, essay or otherwise, should encompass all of a student writer’s experiences in a school year, or even in a single class. Writers of all ages need opportunities to wrestle with form. We don’t want writers to believe, as even some first-year college students do, that big ideas always come in threes, or that one paragraph is always sufficient for sharing their thoughts on one of those ideas. Notably, hardly any pieces of “real world” writing, including published essays, take the form of a five-paragraph essay. That’s another downside: ultimately, the structure is too simple for public discourse. Even as we help students understand and access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay, we must emphasize that the form acts like a set of writerly training wheels. Eventually, with instructors’ guidance, students need to shift from letting form determine their ideas to letting their ideas determine form. At that point, the training wheels should fall away, and writers will zoom forward, perhaps a little wobbly at times, but entirely under their own power.

By Elizabeth Walters, Private Tutor and Writing Coach

Enhancing Your Digital Workstation

August 24, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

With public schools and private schools resuming for this new school year, all of our families are actively engaged in virtual, hybrid or in-person learning. Since the start of Covid, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from families and school colleagues about this huge adjustment to the multiple locations their students need to navigate and organizing a digital workstation that works well in each location. Technology hiccups and some lost instructional time occurred, too, which was anticipated. In the virtual learning space, parents have found themselves doing a lot of teaching, particularly in the morning, in order to help their kids get ready for planned classes or teacher check-ins during the day. Many parents have also felt overwhelmed trying to print resources, access sites, or troubleshoot sessions during their own work day.

Based on families’ feedback, there seems to be variability across schools and between schools. One concern we’ve continued to hear— from teachers and families — is that poor wifi strength creates instructional disruptions; and digital tools require patience and troubleshooting, which can be difficult for many students to manage independently. To that end, it’s important to think strategically about both your physical and digital workstations as we’ll continue to make use of these tools in the coming months and years. Faya and I have been working from home for over 12 years now, so we know it takes a lot of careful planning and investment. To the extent you’re able to optimize your own physical and digital workstation, and your child’s own physical digital workstation, it stands to make distance learning and working remotely a more joyous, productive, and positive experience.

To help, we’ve put together the following “Think Abouts” for organizing your physical and digital workspaces:

Your Physical and Digital Workstation

Do you and your child each have separate physical and digital workstations?
Does your child have an ample supply of writing tools, including pencils, pens, highlighters, markers, or crayons as appropriate? Are these well organized at your child’s workstation in order to minimize lost time and disruptions?
Would your child benefit from either a small white board and/or larger white board for managing goals, to-do items, sub-tasking larger assignments, or planning?
Do you have tools to support time management, including various types of timers or a big, non-ticking analog clock with a glass face on which students can write with dry erase markers to actively “mark up” their intended timing?
Is there a visual and/or auditory barrier to help mitigate disruptions?
Do you have sufficient lighting?
Would your student benefit from a standing desk or balance board?
Where is the printer? Who accesses it? How frequently? If your child likes to print things, are you stocked up on paper and toner?
If you or your child only works on a laptop or an iPad, might you benefit from upgrading to a larger monitor (or two)? When doing a lot of research across multiple sources or documents, or using a number of applications simultaneously, it can be easier to stay organized on a larger and/or multiple screens. A larger monitor also allows for enlarged text, which can make reading, editing, or revising easier.
Do you and/or your child have a writing tablet with a stylus?
Do you and/or your child have a small document camera (which can also serve as a webcam)?
Would your child or family benefit from a small, high-speed scanner?
Would your elementary or middle school child benefit from a small math center stocked with concrete manipulatives, such as base ten blocks, fraction towers, a yard stick, a geared clock, a geoboard, or geometry solids?
Do you have a small home library of picture books or chapter books in print?

Digital Platforms and Related Skills

Do you or your child know how to use digital white boarding?
Do you or your child know more than one way to manage screen sharing?
Do you or your child know more than one way to connect by video conference? Have you or your child practiced extensively with each of these platforms, including Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, or FaceTime.
Do you or your child have familiarity with Google Classroom?
Do you or your child know how to manage Google Drive in order to create shared folders and facilitate collaborative writing? Does this management include creating folders and managing documents so that they’re organized and searchable in effective ways?
Is your phone a hotspot? Do you know how to use it? This contingency planning is important in the event that Spectrum — or whomever your internet service provider (ISP) is — experiences an interruption.

Wifi Troubleshooting Tips

Wifi strength depends on a number of factors, including the incoming signal strength, the modem device, the router device, distance from the router and overall square footage, and the building materials.
When was the last time you restarted both your modem and your router as regular maintenance? As a simple first step, try unplugging each device, restarting the modem first, and then restarting the router in order to resolve any performance issues.
How old is your router? How many square feet is it covering? The new mesh routers are really good. We just installed a Netgear Orbi — there are several versions available, including the newest which supports wifi6 (although that speed and expense isn’t necessary) — and the setup was pretty quick and painless. The improved performance is notable and it resolved dead spots for us right away. Moreover, there are easy to use parent controls built into the mobile app, which allows parents to turn off specific devices from accessing wifi.
Could your child’s laptop or desktop be hard wired to the router rather than relying on wifi? If the laptop doesn’t allow for this connection, selecting a larger monitor to which it could connect might then allow for this option.

We know that optimizing a physical and digital workstation — or dealing with digital infrastructure — is a lot to manage. At the same time, it’s a concrete step that can help to improve the instructional experience and restore a certain level or order while directly building executive function and new digital skills.

If you have questions, concerns, or ideas, we’d be happy to listen, help, and troubleshoot with you as needed. Our digital coaching can be differentiated for students of all ages, including adults! Please don’t hesitate to reach out!

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

Being The Teacher Is a Powerful Learning Strategy

August 19, 2021 Brad Hoffman 1 Comment

OK…as a parent, teacher, coach, or private tutor….it is our job to teach, right? Well, yes, but not always. One of the most powerful teaching tools we have is giving our students the “job” of being the teacher and teaching us. There are several specific reasons for this:

First, often the role of “purveyor of knowledge” is very appealing to kids. I have watched students of all types rise to the occasion of being the teacher. It seems especially appealing if they are asked to teach one or two younger children, or if they are asked to teach an adult!

Second, I have found that I cannot teach anything I don’t truly understand. In the process of teaching, I often uncover any slightly murky parts of my own understanding. This leads me to more thinking and better understanding of the topic. For students who take on the role of being the teacher, the same often holds true. As they try to teach me, they discover what they truly DO know, as well as what is still unclear. Finding out what questions they still need to ask makes them better learners.

Third, we learn a great deal about our students’ depth of understanding by truly listening to what they “teach” us. (Note: truly listening can be a challenge for those of us who are bursting with excitement to teach or who are up against a time crunch or any number of other stressors, but listening is essential.) In the role of “learner” we can appropriately ask questions which will clarify what they really know. We can also determine whether their knowledge is rote (memorization of formulas, timelines, etc.) or actual conceptual understanding of ideas and processes. In some cases, we can guide deeper understanding through creative questioning. Other times we simply uncover misunderstandings and/or shallow understanding that guides our next steps in instruction. Sometimes the discovery is not in the precise area of instruction but in a crucial related area! These “teachable moments” can be especially beneficial to our students.

One of my favorite collateral “wins” from giving students the powerful role of being the teacher is that they really do teach me new learning. My own, very legitimate, excitement about learning something new is contagious. It is valuable for students to realize that respected adults continue to learn, and that we are excited about learning, all the time. By being open to thinking about ideas in new and different ways, I am validating their thinking process and the control they have over their own learning; and I learn something new myself! Now that is powerful!

By Jean Snyder, Private Tutor

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All Articles tagged Testing

Building A Strong College Application

Why Consider Boarding Schools?

Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay?

Enhancing Your Digital Workstation

Your Physical and Digital Workstation

Digital Platforms and Related Skills

Wifi Troubleshooting Tips

Being The Teacher Is a Powerful Learning Strategy

Company Overview

School Planning

Private Tutoring

Test Preparation