Assessment Methods

Strive serves students attending more than 25 public, charter, and private catholic schools, each with their own academic, behavioral, and disciplinary standards. We help our students rise to Strive’s standards by stressing the formula below:

Although it is challenging to assess students with such diverse educational experiences, we employ several methods to track student development.

Entrance Exam:

Upon registering, students are given an entrance exam that enables us to place them in one of our six classrooms depending on their competency in Reading, Language Arts & Mathematics. We offer both advanced and remedial multi-age combination classrooms in order to challenge all students at their level of proficiency.

Our Strive Academic Survey:

At the beginning of the school year, students are assessed using a California Standards based English Language Arts and Mathematics exam. This exam contains the fundamental skills and knowledge that students should know at the end of the year. After each semester, students are retested with practice exams so that teachers can monitor progress and reteach any necessary lessons.

See 2023-24 Test Results See 2022-23 Test Results See 2018-19 Test Results

This type of formal norm-based assessment helps our instructors evaluate what parts of their instruction are more successful than others and what parts need to be honed in order to better reach our students. As a result of engaging in such ongoing assessment, our team can continually improve our offerings to students here at Strive.

Student Grade Tracking:

Our primary objective is to evaluate how attendance at Strive is translating into academic achievement at school, with the secondary objective of tracking changes in behavior. Using the marks for participation and the comments of teachers we are able to evaluate the effectiveness of the mentoring and guidance services we provide. Aggregate data tends to minimize the gains of individual students, so instead we post the Strive Honor Roll to celebrate the students that had the most dramatic academic improvements over the course of the year.

See Honor Roll – 2018/19 See Honor Roll – 2017/18 See Honor Roll – 2016/17

Reasons for Assessing:

By assessing our students with both of these tools, we not only ensure that our instructors stay on top of each student’s academic needs and progress, but we also can honor all of the young people that come to our campus by getting to know and embrace each child as an individual with their own unique gifts. In this way, all of us at here at Strive are better able to help guide our young people along as they make their way toward accomplishing their goals and reaching their highest potential.