Learning and Life Skills

Thinking to Learn makes the New York Times - In Manhattan, Preparing for Kindergarten Admission Test - NYTimes.com

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Read the entire article here:  via www.nytimes.com

Thinking To Learn is mentioned in this article in the New York Time discussing how parents of young children are accessing resources to prep for high-stakes testing in New York City.

Parents need to understand how to spend time with their children in ways that are meaningful.  My position has been that teaching and developing a child's thinking skills is one of the ways to spend that time.  Those skills are being assessed on reasoning tests like the OLSAT (Otis-Lennon School Abilities Test) with high-stakes implications - access to gifted programs where curriculum and learning are differentiated to meet the intellectual needs of the child.  With the economic conditions what they are, and private school tuition what it is, parents are more keen on the idea of enrolling children in public schools, but hoping to have them placed in the gifted and talented programs.  

Regardless of whether a child earns a qualifying score for acceptance into these special programs, parents need to attend to the importance of developing their child's reasoning and problem-solving skills.  The resources we recommend to parents at Thinking To Learn, imbed critical thinking skills in the content, or teach those skills directly.  I recommend them to all parents, regardless of your child's ability.  These skills, at their core, are learning skills important for life.

What do the OLSAT scores mean and how are they used?

The Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT) is designed as a group assessment measuring certain cognitive skills deemed important for successful learning.   These skills are higher order reasoning skills involving analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  The skills permit student learners to better understand the content they are learning, to better recall what they understand, to be more logical, to perceive relationships, attend to details, and to form generalizations and apply them to new content.

What are the main segments of the OLSAT?

The OLSAT consists of the following items:

The Verbal Section: Verbal Comprehension: following directions, antonymns, sentence completion and sentence arrangement; Verbal Reasoning: aural reasoning, arithemetic reasoning, logical selection, word/letter matriz, verbal analogies, verbal classification, and inference.

The NonVerbal section consists of: Pictorial reasoning – picture classification, picture analogies, picture series; Figural Reasoning – figural classification, figural analogies, pattern matrix, and figural series; and Quantitative Reasoning – number series, numberic inference, and number matrix.

Not all items are assessed at every level.   This information can be obtained through Harcourt's site, by accessing a PDF document.  On page 4 you'll see the Scope and Sequence guide by grade level.

Find resources for developing the verbal and figural reasoning skills of children at our website/webstore: Thinking To Learn.com  

What is the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT)?

The Otis-Lennon School Abilities Test is an assessment often used to determine whether children gain access to gifted and talented programming in the school or school district.  It is published by Harcourt Assessment, and is not accessible for review by parents.

The publisher's overview reads:

"To learn new things, students must be able to perceive accurately, to recognize and recall what has been perceived, to think logically, to perceive relationships, to abstract from a set of particulars, and to apply a generalization to new and different contexts. By evaluating a student’s performance on a variety of tasks, OLSAT 8 assesses those abilities that are related to success in school. Tasks such as detecting likenesses and differences, recalling words and numbers, defining words, following directions, classifying, establishing sequence, solving arithmetic problems, and completing analogies are included in OLSAT 8 since they have been shown to be valid measures of an individual’s ability to reason logically."