Time for Iowa Assessments

Audrey Rieken, Principal                                                                Christopher Reeves – 8^th SIL

Heather Farris, Vice Principal                                                           Kristy Fitzgerald – 7^th SIL

Melissa Nevels, Office Manager                                                         Mike Pecina – 6^th SIL

Kathleen Paul, Nurse                                                                       Leah Lingren – Counselor

A Focal Point of Pride for the Southside 

Dear Parents:

In the next few weeks, your child will be taking the Iowa Assessments.  The main purposes of the Iowa Assessments are to provide the school with information that can be used to improve instruction and to help teachers make sound educational decisions about each student’s learning.  The scores allow teachers to check each student’s year-to-year growth and to identify some of each student’s strong areas of achievement and needed areas of improvement.

The Iowa Assessments cover many of the fundamental skills your child is learning in school in the areas of reading, mathematics, and science.  The results from the Iowa Assessments will not be used to determine report card grades of students.  Instead, teachers, counselors, and administrators in your school will use the results to monitor students’ learning of some of the important skills taught in school.  Scores from tests like the Iowa Assessments cannot replace a teacher’s observations and judgments, but they can provide useful supplementary information for the teacher, the parent, and the student.  When test results are used in conjunction with other information from both the classroom and the home, teachers and parents can work together to identify and address the educational needs of each student.

Students should be encouraged to do their best on the Iowa Assessments, as they should for all of their school activities.  Below are some test-taking tips that can help your child obtain test scores that accurately reflect his or her achievement.  We encourage you to talk with your child about these ideas.

• During the week of testing, make sure you get as much sleep each night as you normally get on a school night.
• Read and listen carefully to the directions for each test while your teacher reads them.  Then follow those directions exactly.  If you don’t understand the directions, ask you teacher to explain them.
• Look at all the answer choices for a question before you select one as your answer.  For many test questions, you will need to compare the answer choices and then choose the best one.
• If you are not sure about the correct answer to a test question, first eliminate any choices you know are wrong.  Then choose your answer from among the choices that remain.
• Your teacher will tell you how much time you will have to work on each test.  Try to work at a steady pace and try not to waste time.  If a certain question is taking a lot of time, you may want to skip it and try it again later if there’s time.

Thank you for your commitment as we work together to identify and address your child’s educational needs.

Des Moines Public Schools