When I was in college, I worked for one of the major test prep companies. In our first lesson we told our students, mostly children of high paying parents, their SAT scores are most strongly correlated with wealth. The script was pretty tacky at the time and, 25 years later, it hasn’t aged well.

You can find updated work on the subject here: “New study finds wide gap in SAT/ACT test scores between wealthy, lower-income kids” from the Harvard Gazette link

The goal of this intro was to put the students into a positive mindset to focus on learning. We believed knowing they could move their scores up was important for the learning process. We followed it up with training and toward the end of the course another discussion on mindset. The second discussion was to ask the students to avoid all voluntary major life events in the weeks leading up to the test. Pretty cringe now, but it was what we asked. The first discussion aligned with getting our students to focus on the “not yet” as discussed by Carol Dweck here. The second mindset discussion focused on the importance of these standardized tests to their long term future. YET Impact wise, many of my students saw substantial score improvements. The student’s positive mindsets were the accelerator for their learning and test performance improvement. How does this apply to Bellevue Discovery?

Ask our Discovery leaders if this makes sense: I have asked several leaders what they believe our students could achieve. Their responses led to this website.

It feels like a good time to knuckle up as a Discovery Family!

Until next time,
Will