Here’s to the Teachers

Through both my own education and by what I have observed as we developed and launched ChalkTalk, I’ve always known that teachers are the unsung heroes of our world. The last eight months spent adapting to the realities of COVID-19 have only confirmed that. Teachers have had to exert even more effort and are digging […]

Managing Instructional Time to Achieve Measurable Impacts

With so many demands on classroom time, preparing students for standardized testing is not the most rewarding way for teachers—or students—to spend limited instructional hours. But as the ACT and SAT move from individual efforts by college-bound students to state-mandated assessments for entire schools and districts, teachers and administrators are looking for ways to give […]

Program Shows 200-600% More Growth on Student ACT and SAT Scores, Compared to National Average

Schools implementing ChalkTalk see significant improvements in a fraction of the control group’s time NEW YORK CITY, NY / FEBRUARY 28, 2020 — After releasing its biggest software update to date at the start of the fall 2019 semester, ChalkTalk has published its latest round of impact studies. These studies demonstrate significant SAT and ACT […]

Helping Your Students Do Better on Their Tests or Teaching Them for Understanding—When to Make a Pedagogical Compromise?

“The reason I got into teaching? To help students maximize test scores,” said no teacher or administrator ever. Sharing a love of learning and helping kids unlock their innate potential is a much more likely answer to that question, of course. So when is it okay to make a pedagogical compromise and prioritize test scores […]

Understanding the emerging state-by-state role of the SAT and ACT

Since its beginnings in 1926, the SAT spent most of its life as a daunting test of knowledge for college-bound students. Preparation for the SAT (and its competitor, the ACT) revolved around memorizing arcane vocabulary words and stressing out over trickily-worded math questions. Depending upon the selectivity of the universities that students were targeting, getting […]