Crimson Review has been helping West Chester, PA students achieve their goals for 35 years. We offer superior test preparation services to help students achieve their goals on the SAT and ACT.
Helping Local High School Students Achieve Higher SAT Scores
While we haven’t been around as long as Henderson High School (it has 100 years on us in one form or another), we have been working with Henderson students since shortly after we opened our doors. West Chester East only has 12 years on us, and we were helping students for 20 years prior to Bayard Rustin High School opening its doors in 2006! During this time, we’ve not only been helping students improve their SAT and ACT scores, but also helping parents navigate the sometimes overwhelming world of standardized testing and college admissions. It’s not only students who can have anxiety around testing!
A Mastery of SAT Subject Matter
In the late 1960s, an educational psychologist named Benjamin Bloom (a Pennsylvania native, and Penn State graduate) began to take an interest in teaching, curriculum, and how to maximize student learning in schools. His research led him to publish in 1984 the famous (in educational research circles) “2 Sigma Problem”, which showed that students receiving 1-1 tutoring using mastery learning techniques performed 2 standard deviations better than students in regular classrooms. The average tutored student was better than 98% of the regular class students at learning new materials. This was one of the largest effects on learning ever seen.
Bloom and his converted fellow educational researchers and designers quickly went to work applying this to school classrooms. 1-1 tutoring is by nature expensive, so Bloom and others developed ways to bring the benefits to a larger number of students, led by one teacher. They were able to do this, but it came with significant drawbacks that led to resistance from all facets of the current schools. Teachers objected to having to learn a new and very different methodology. Administrators didn’t like the additional costs incurred in transitioning to and maintaining the new class structure. Textbook and educational materials makers didn’t like it because it would have required significant investment and forced more competition on them. So like many great ideas that would benefit society, Bloom’s ideas and programs were largely shut out of mainstream public schools because the people benefitting from the current regime were the same ones required to adopt the new one.
Mastery learning has lived on in different forms in some private and charter schools that have the resources and desire to embrace it. The results they see year in and year out are something to behold. As everything in education tends to go in cycles, public schools may “discover” this in some programs with the same substance and a different name in the near future.
SAT Mastery with Crimson Review
Crimson Review is one of the places Mastery Learning lives on. For us, it is a foundational component that we have used as the main backbone of our programs. We have then looked through the research to find other proven techniques for accelerating learning and added those on top. Our 1-1 instruction, SAT Full Course, and SAT Summer Boot Camp all utilize Mastery Learning in some form or another. We have seen the results it drives, and continues to drive, as we work with students in West Chester and the broader Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware county school populations.
It’s a different program from most tutoring companies, and it truly sets us apart. Want to learn more about Mastery Learning, our courses, or anything else related to standardized testing? Give us a call at 610.688.6441.
