Dear Families,
Assessment is an important part of your child’s academic career. Over the course of the school year, your child will participate in a variety of benchmark assessments designed to assess each student’s growth and progress toward mastery of the learning goals specified in the Brookfield Public School curriculum. Classroom assessments will also be used to guide instruction in order to provide every child with the opportunity to learn and to succeed. Attached is a brief description of the school-wide benchmark assessments that all students in grades 2-4 will participate in during this school year.
School-wide benchmark assessments are scheduled to take place three times per school year, once in the fall, once in the winter, and once in the spring. After the testing periods your child’s performance on the assessments we administer will be communicated with you through a family assessment letter shared via PowerSchool's DocumentLok.
There is no need to study at home in preparation for any of these assessments. The best way to help your child be prepared is to do what you do every day. Make sure your child gets plenty of rest each night, eats a healthy breakfast each morning, and arrives at school on time.
It is always helpful to encourage your child to do his or her best! Please remind him or her that these assessments are a measure of progress to help us plan better instruction, and not something used to judge students.
If you would like any additional information about any of these assessments, please contact your child’s classroom teacher.
Thank you for all that you do to guide your child’s learning!
Sincerely,
The HHES Team
Assessment Descriptions
Acadience Reading Benchmark and Progress Monitoring Assessments
Acadience Math Benchmark and Progress Monitoring Assessments
Open Court Sight Words:
Our foundational skills program, Open Court, includes sight word instruction. These are words that students must know automatically in order to read fluently. All students are tested in the fall and on an as-needed basis in the winter and spring.
CORE Phonics Inventory:
Given during the winter of second grade and used diagnostically during other time periods
Spelling Inventory: Primary, Elementary, or Upper Elementary version (dependent on grade level and individual student progress)
Star Math
Otis Lennon School Aptitude Test (OLSAT):
The OLSAT measures abstract thinking, reasoning abilities, and the unique attributes each student brings to the learning process. The OLSAT is based on the idea that to learn new things, students must be able to perceive accurately, to recognize and recall what has been perceived, to think logically, to understand relationships, to abstract from a set of particulars, and to apply generalizations to new and different contexts. These abilities are assessed through performance on such tasks as detecting likenesses and differences, recalling words and numbers, defining words, following directions, classifying, establishing sequence, solving arithmetic problems, and competing analogies. Students in 3rd grade take the OLSAT in the fall. Any new students in 4th grade are also tested in the fall.
For more information on what the different benchmark family communication letters are as well as what assessments are used for, please watch this short six minute video.