This one’s for the parents. Test is a four letter for students. At least it was for me and I certainly have some thoughts even as an adult. Thanks to new studies and some reframing, it’s now a welcome word in our house.

As a first step, we worked on reframing “testing” to help our daughter keep a cool head during a test and focus on doing her best and not the score. With a perfectionist child, this has been incredibly hard. We are working to remind her that, especially at the age of 9, testing gives us an idea of where she needs help.

The goal of school is to learn, right. If she knows everything and is breezing through school, is she getting the school experience she needs and deserves. Nope. How do we learn? We make mistakes. We get things wrong.

Step 1: Failure is a good thing, it means we are learning.

An important second step came along recently when I was listening to the Andrew Huberman podcast. I’m not going to explain the whole podcast episode to you because well, you can go listen for yourself. What I will say is that a big takeaway for me was about using testing as a study tool.

After listening to the episode, I decided to experiment with my daughter. She had just started a new school year, 4th grade, and each week they bring home 10 words to learn about through various activities and then they do a spelling test at the end of the week.

Reading and spelling have been tough subjects for her. Throw her in front of a math problem and she’s on fire, but reading/writing/spelling are a struggle which results in her confidence plummeting and her struggling even more. The first week of words, she studied them and then I gave her a practice test. She scored 6/10. Not great but it’s ok. Second practice test, 7/10. Third practice test, 8/10. Test day at school, 10/10.

Step 2: Study once, practice test 3 times.

My girl came home beaming. We have continued this week and she’s picked up some new strategies to help her with spelling new words, coupled with the practice testing and spelling has gone from her least favorite subject to one she is enjoying. And she’s more engaged in school work overall because she’s seeing the payoff of her hard work. She even asked me to give her a practice test after basketball practice today. Thank you, Dr. Huberman!

Take a breath, you got this.

xoxo