Assessment

Assessment is a vital part of the Laurel Springs educational process. We want to know as much as we can about our students and their progress. Our goal is not to compare them to other students, but to measure their progress and gather information about learning.

Learning Styles Profile

Laurel Springs assesses five aspects of your child’s learning style: disposition, modality, interests, talents and preferred environment. The profile helps our parents better understand their child’s blueprint for learning, and offers helpful study tips and techniques. By understanding your child’s learning style, parents can help children excel not only in school, but in life.

Mastery-Based Program

Our program is mastery-based, meaning that our teachers can adjust the content or pace of lessons to suit the needs of our students. Mastery-based education is centered on the principle that once your children demonstrate that they have a proficient understanding of the lesson’s concepts, they may progress to subsequent lessons. This approach to learning allows our students to work through lessons at their own speed, with opportunities to revise assignments until understanding is effectively demonstrated. It also encourages our teachers to reinforce key curricular topics according to the needs of each individual student.

Grades and Feedback

Our teachers grade each lesson with care. They make comments that address your child’s areas of strength and challenge with expertise and compassion. Grades, comments and student progress can be viewed online in our learning management system (LMS) by both students and parents in our user-friendly, interactive grade book.

Diagnostic Assessment

Diagnostic assessments are designed to provide parents, students and teachers with specific information about what skills your student has and has not mastered. The results empower students, parents and teachers to pinpoint, assign and review those areas your student must master before moving on to more complex materials.

Ongoing Assessment

Since our approach is mastery-based, our students need to demonstrate that they understand assignments and courses. In this light, we have developed a student-centered approach to assessment that helps us better understand each child and measure the effectiveness of our courses.

In addition to the assessment and feedback that is built into every course, the Terra Nova, a national norm-referenced standardized test, is administered to full-time Laurel Springs students in 4th through 11th grade, every other year. This test provides valuable information about each student’s academic progress in language arts and mathematics.

If you have questions, please contact our student services team at 855-658-8682.